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BIOGRAPHICAL 



AND 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



BY 



WILLIAM H. PRESCOTT, 

N 

AUTHOR OF "THE HISTORY OF FERDINAND AND ISABELLA," "THE CONQUEST 

OF MEXICO," ETC. 



NEW EDITION. 







&A%Q$ Lu >j 



PHILADELPHIA: 

J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO. 
1875- 






«v* 



Entered, according to Act of Congress, in the year 1875, by 

J. B. LIPPINCOTT & CO., 
In the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington. 






TO 

GEORGE TICKNOR, ESQ., 

THIS VOLUME, 

WHICH MAY REMIND HIM OF STUDIES PURSUED TOGETHER 

IN EARLIER YEARS, 

IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED 

BY HIS FRIEND, 

WILLIAM H. PRESCOTT. 



PUBLISHERS' ADVERTISEMENT. 



The Publishers have the pleasure of announcing, 
with the issue of this volume, the completion of their 
new edition of Mr. Prescott's Works, printed from 
entirely new stereotype plates. 

During the last years of his life Mr. Prescott devoted 
much time to the revision of his works, making numer- 
ous corrections and additions, some of which were 
inserted in the later English editions published in his 
lifetime, while a larger number have hitherto remained 
in manuscript. The whole, in accordance with his 
intention, are incorporated in the present edition, 
which the editor has endeavored to render still more 
valuable and complete by verifying doubtful references, 
adding occasional notes where statements in the text, 
based on insufficient authority or called in question by 
recent investigators, needed to be substantiated or cor- 
rected, and aiding, by a careful supervision of the press, 
in securing that high degree of typographical accuracy 
which is especially desirable in standard works. 

Philadelphia, May i, 1875. 

a* ( v) 



PREFACE 

TO THE ENGLISH EDITION. 



The following Essays, with a single exception, have 
been selected from contributions originally made to 
the North American Review. They are purely of a 
literary character ; and, as they have little reference 
to local or temporary topics, and as the journal in 
which they appeared, though the most considerable 
in the United States, is not widely circulated in Great 
Britain, it has been thought that a republication of 
the articles might have some novelty and interest for 
the English reader. 

Several of the papers were written many years since; 
and the author is aware that they betray those crudi- 
ties in the execution which belong to an unpractised 
writer, while others of more recent date may be 
charged with the inaccuracies incident to rapid and, 
sometimes, careless composition. The more obvious 
blemishes he has endeavored to correct, without at- 
tempting to reform the critical judgments, which in 
some cases he could wish had been expressed in a 
more qualified and temperate manner ; and he dis- 
misses the volume with the hope that in submitting it 
to the British public he may not be thought to have 
relied too far on that indulgence which has been so 
freely extended to his more elaborate efforts. 

Boston, March 30, 1845. 
(vi) 



CONTENTS. 



PAGE 

CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN, THE AMERICAN NOVELIST . 1 

ASYLUM FOR THE BLIND S3 

IRVING'S CONQUEST OF GRANADA 82 

CERVANTES 114 

SIR WALTER SCOTT 163 

CHATEAUBRIAND'S ENGLISH LITERATURE .... 227 

BANCROFT'S UNITED STATES 272 

MADAME CALDERON'S LIFE IN MEXICO .... 315 

MOLIERE 335 

ITALIAN NARRATIVE TOETRY 381 

POETRY AND ROMANCE OF THE ITALIANS .... 455 

SCOTTISH SONG . . 532 

DA PONTE'S OBSERVATIONS 559 

TICKNOR'S HISTORY OF SPANISH LITERATURE . . . 6dO 



(vii) 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL 

MISCELLANIES 



MEMOIR OF 
CHARLES BROCKDEN BROWN, 

THE AMERICAN NOVELIST* 

The class of professed men of letters, if we exclude 
from the account the conductors of periodical journals, 
is certainly not very large, even at the present day, in 
our country; but before the close of the last century it 
was nearly impossible to meet with an individual who 
looked to authorship as his only, or, indeed, his prin- 
cipal, means of subsistence. This was somewhat the 
more remarkable, considering the extraordinary de- 
velopment of intellectual power exhibited in every 
quarter of the country, and applied to every variety 
of moral and social culture, and formed a singular 
contrast with more than one nation in Europe, where 
literature still continued to be followed as a distinct 
profession, amid all the difficulties resulting from an 
arbitrary government and popular imbecility and ig- 
norance. 

* From Sparks's American Biography, 1834. 
A I 



2 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

Abundant reasons are suggested for this by the va- 
rious occupations afforded to talent of all kinds, not 
only in the exercise of political functions, but in the 
splendid career opened to enterprise of every descrip- 
tion in our free and thriving community. We were in 
the morning of life, as it were, when every thing sum- 
moned us to action ; when the spirit was quickened by 
hope and youthful confidence; and we felt that we 
had our race to run, unlike those nations who, having 
reached the noontide of their glory or sunk into their 
decline, were naturally led to dwell on the soothing 
recollections of the past, and to repose themselves, 
after a tumultuous existence, in the quiet pleasures of 
study and contemplation. "It was amid the ruins of 
the Capitol," says Gibbon, "that I first conceived the 
idea of writing the History of the Roman Empire." 
The occupation suited well with the spirit of the place, 
but would scarcely have harmonized with the life of 
bustling energy and the thousand novelties which 
were perpetually stimulating the appetite for adventure 
in our new and unexplored hemisphere. In short, to 
express it in one word, the peculiarities of our situa- 
tion as naturally disposed us to active life as those of 
the old countries of Europe to contemplative. 

The subject of the present memoir affords an almost 
solitary example, at this period, of a scholar, in the 
enlarged application of the term, who cultivated let- 
ters as a distinct and exclusive profession, resting his 
means of support, as well as his fame, on his success, 
and who, as a writer of fiction, is still farther entitled 
to credit for having quitted the beaten grounds of the 
Old Country and sought his subjects in the untried 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 3 

wilderness of his own. The particulars of his un- 
ostentatious life have been collected with sufficient 
industry by his friend Mr. William Dunlap, to whom 
our native literature is under such large obligations for 
the extent and fidelity of his researches. We will se- 
lect a few of the most prominent incidents from a mass 
of miscellaneous fragments and literary lumber with 
which his work is somewhat encumbered. It were to 
be wished that, in the place of some of them, more 
copious extracts had been substituted for his journal 
and correspondence, which, doubtless, in this as in 
other cases, must afford the most interesting as well as 
authentic materials for biography. 

Charles Brockden Brown was born at Philadel- 
phia, January 17th, 1 771. He was descended from a 
highly respectable family, whose ancestors were of that 
estimable sect who came over with William Perm to 
seek an asylum where they might worship their Creator 
unmolested in the meek and humble spirit of their own 
faith. From his earliest childhood Brown gave evi- 
dence of his studious propensities, being frequently no- 
ticed by his father, on his return from school, poring 
over some heavy tome, nothing daunted by the formi- 
dable words it contained, or mounted on a table and 
busily engaged in exploring a map which hung on the 
parlor wall. This infantine predilection for geograph- 
ical studies ripened into a passion in later years. An- 
other anecdote, recorded of him at the age of ten, sets 
in a still stronger light his appreciation of intellectual 
pursuits far above his years. A visitor at his father's 
having rebuked him, as it would seem, without cause, 
for some remark he had made, gave him the con- 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



> > 



temptuous epithet of "boy." "What does he mean, 
said the young philosopher, after the guest's depart- 
ure, "by calling me boy? Does he not know that it 
is neither size nor age, but sense, that makes the man? 
I could ask him a hundred questions, none of which he 
could answer." 

At eleven years of age he was placed under the tui- 
tion of Mr. Robert Proud, well known as the author 
of the History of Pennsylvania. Under his direction 
he went over a large course of English reading, and 
acquired the elements of Greek and Latin, applying 
himself with great assiduity to his studies. His bodily 
health was naturally delicate, and indisposed him to 
engage in the robust, athletic exercises of boyhood. 
His sedentary habits, however, began so evidently to 
impair his health that his master recommended him to 
withdraw from his books and recruit his strength by 
excursions on foot into the country. These pedestrian 
rambles suited the taste of the pupil, and the length 
of his absence often excited the apprehensions of his 
friends for his safety. He may be thought to have sat 
to himself for this portrait of one of his heroes. "I 
preferred to ramble in the forest and loiter on the hill ; 
perpetually to change the scene; to scrutinize the end- 
less variety of objects; to compare one leaf and pebble 
with another; to pursue those trains of thought which 
their resemblances and differences suggested; to inquire 
what it was that gave them this place, structure, and 
form, were more agreeable employments than ploughing 
and threshing." " My frame was delicate and feeble. 
Exposure to wet blasts and vertical suns was sure to 
make me sick. ' ' The fondness for these solitary rambles 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 5 

continued through life, and the familiarity which they 
opened to him with the grand and beautiful scenes of 
nature undoubtedly contributed to nourish the habit 
of revery and abstraction, and to deepen the romantic 
sensibilities from which flowed so much of his misery, 
as well as happiness, in after-life. 

He quitted Mr. Proud's school before the age of 
sixteen. He had previously made some small poetical 
attempts, and soon after sketched the plans of three 
several epics, on the discovery of America and the 
conquests of Peru and Mexico. For some time they 
engaged his attention to the exclusion of every other 
object. No vestige of them now remains, or, at least, 
has been given to the public, by which we can ascer- 
tain the progress made towards their completion. The 
publication of such immature juvenile productions may 
gratify curiosity by affording a point of comparison with 
later excellence. They are rarely, however, of value in 
themselves sufficient to authorize their exposure to the 
world, and, notwithstanding the occasional exception 
of a Pope or a Pascal, may very safely put up with 
Uncle Toby's recommendation on a similar display of 
precocity, "to hush it up, and say as little about it as 
possible." 

Among the contributions which, at a later period of 
life, he was in the habit of making to different journals, 
the fate of one was too singular to be passed over in 
silence. It was a poetical address to Franklin, pre- 
pared for the Edentown newspaper. " The blundering 
printer," says Brown, in his journal, "from zeal or 
ignorance, or perhaps from both, substituted the name 
of Washington. Washington, therefore, stands arrayed 



biographical and 



in awkward colors ; philosophy smiles to behold her 
darling son ; she turns with horror and disgust from 
those who have won the laurel of victory in the field 
of battle, to this her favorite candidate, who had never 
participated in such bloody glory, and whose fame was 
derived from the conquest of philosophy alone. The 
printer, by his blundering ingenuity, made the subject 
ridiculous. Every word of this clumsy panegyric was a 
direct slander upon Washington, and so it was regarded 
at the time." There could not well be imagined a more 
expeditious or effectual recipe for converting eulogy into 
satire. 

Young Brown had now reached a period of life when 
it became necessary to decide on a profession. After 
due deliberation, he determined on the law, — a choice 
which received the cordial approbation of his friends, 
who saw in his habitual diligence and the character of 
his mind, at once comprehensive and logical, the most 
essential requisites for success. He entered on the 
studies of his profession with his usual ardor ; and the 
acuteness and copiousness of his arguments on various 
topics proposed for discussion in a law-society over 
which he presided bear ample testimony to his ability 
and industry. But, however suited to his talents the 
profession of the law might be, it was not at all to his 
taste. He became a member of a literary club, in which 
he made frequent essays in composition and eloquence. 
He kept a copious journal, and by familiar exercise 
endeavored to acquire a pleasing and graceful style of 
writing ; and every hour that he could steal from pro- 
fessional schooling was devoted to the cultivation of 
more attractive literature. In one of his contributions 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 7 

to a journal, just before this period, he speaks of " the 
rapture with which he held communion with his own 
thoughts amid the gloom of surrounding woods, where 
his fancy peopled every object with ideal beings, and 
the barrier between himself and the world of spirits 
seemed burst by the force of meditation. In this 
solitude, he felt himself surrounded by a delightful 
society ; but when transported from thence, and com- 
pelled to listen to the frivolous chat of his fellow- 
beings, he suffered all the miseries of solitude." He 
declares that his intercourse and conversation with 
mankind had wrought a salutary change; that he can 
now mingle in the concerns of life, perform his appro- 
priate duties, and reserve that higher species of discourse 
for the solitude and silence of his study. In this 
supposed control over his romantic fancies he grossly 
deceived himself. 

As the time approached for entering on the practice 
of his profession, he felt his repugnance to it increase 
more and more ; and he sought to justify a retreat from 
it altogether by such poor sophistry as his imagination 
could suggest. He objected to the profession as having 
something in it immoral. He could not reconcile it 
with his notions of duty to come forward as the cham- 
pion indiscriminately of right and wrong ; and he con- 
sidered the stipendiary advocate of a guilty party as 
becoming, by that very act, participator in the guilt. 
He did not allow himself to reflect that no more equita- 
ble arrangement could be devised, none which would give 
the humblest individual so fair a chance for maintaining 
his rights as the employment of competent and upright 
counsel, familiar with the forms of legal practice, neces- 



8 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

sarily so embarrassing to a stranger ; that, so far from 
being compelled to undertake a cause manifestly unjust, 
it is always in the power of an honest lawyer to decline 
it, but that such contingencies are of most rare occur- 
rence, as few cases are litigated where each party has 
not previously plausible grounds for believing himself 
in the right, a question only to be settled by fair 
discussion on both sides ; that opportunities are not 
wanting, on the other hand, which invite the highest 
display of eloquence and professional science in de- 
tecting and defeating villany, in vindicating slandered 
innocence, and in expounding the great principles of 
law on which the foundations of personal security and 
property are established ; and, finally, that the most 
illustrious names in his own and every other civilized 
country have been drawn from the ranks of a profession 
whose habitual discipline so well trains them for legis- 
lative action and the exercise of the highest political 
functions. 

Brown cannot be supposed to have been insensible 
to these obvious views ; and, indeed, from one of his 
letters in later life, he appears to have clearly recog- 
nized the value of the profession he had deserted. But 
his object was, at this time, to justify himself in his 
fickleness of purpose, as he best might, in his own 
eyes and those of his friends. Brown was certainly 
not the first man of genius who found himself incapa- 
ble of resigning the romantic world of fiction and the 
uncontrolled revels of the imagination for the dull and 
prosaic realities of the law. Few, indeed, like Mans- 
field, have been able so far to constrain their young 
and buoyant imaginations as to merit the beautiful 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 9 

eulogium of the English poet ; while many more com- 
paratively, from the time of Juvenal downward, fortu- 
nately for the world, have been willing to sacrifice the 
affections plighted to Themis on the altars of the Muse. 

Brown's resolution at this crisis caused sincere regret 
to his friends, which they could not conceal, on seeing 
him thus suddenly turn from the path of honorable 
fame at the very moment when he was prepared to 
enter on it. His prospects, but lately so brilliant, 
seemed now overcast with a deep gloom. The embar- 
rassments of his situation had also a most unfavorable 
effect on his own mind. Instead of the careful disci- 
pline to which it had been lately subjected, it was now 
left to rove at large wherever caprice should dictate, 
and waste itself on those romantic reveries and specu- 
lations to which he was naturally too much addicted. 
This was the period when the French Revolution was 
in its heat, and the awful convulsion experienced in 
one unhappy country seemed to be felt in every quarter 
of the globe ; men grew familiar with the wildest para- 
doxes, and the spirit of innovation menaced the oldest 
and best-established principles in morals and govern- 
ment. Brown's inquisitive and speculative mind par- 
took of the prevailing skepticism. Some of his com- 
positions, and especially one on the Rights of Women, 
published in 1797, show to what extravagance a benev- 
olent mind may be led by fastening too exclusively on 
the contemplation of the evils of existing institutions 
and indulging in indefinite dreams of perfectibility. 

There is no period of existence when the spirit of a 
man is more apt to be depressed than when he is about 
to quit the safe and quiet harbor in which he has rode 

A* 



IO BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

in safety from childhood, and to launch on the dark 
and unknown ocean where so many a gallant bark has 
gone down before him. How much must this disquiet- 
ude be increased in the case of one who, like Brown, 
has thrown away the very chart and compass by which 
he was prepared to guide himself through the doubtful 
perils of the voyage ! How heavily the gloom of de- 
spondency fell on his spirits at this time is attested by 
various extracts from his private correspondence. " As 
for me," he says, in one of his letters, "I long ago 
discovered that Nature had not qualified me for an 
actor on this stage. The nature of my education only 
added to these disqualifications, and I experienced all 
those deviations from the centre which arise when all 
our lessons are taken from books, and the scholar 
makes his own character the comment. A happy des- 
tiny, indeed, brought me to the knowledge of two or 
three minds which Nature had fashioned in the same 
mould with my own, but these are gone. And, O 
God ! enable me to wait the moment when it is thy 
will that I should follow them." In another epistle 
he remarks, "I have not been deficient in the pursuit 
of that necessary branch of knowledge, the study of 
myself. I will not explain the result, for have I not 
already sufficiently endeavored to make my friends 
unhappy by communications which, though they might 
easily be injurious, could not be of any possible advan- 
tage? I really, dear W., regret that period when your 
pity was first excited in my favor. I sincerely lament 
that I ever gave you reason to imagine that I was not 
so happy as a gay indifference with regard to the pres- 
ent, stubborn forgetfulness with respect to the uneasy 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. ri 

past, and excursions into lightsome futurity could 
make me ; for what end, what useful purposes, were 
promoted by the discovery ? It could not take away 
from the number of the unhappy, but only add to it* 
by making those who loved me participate in my un- 
easiness, which each participation, so far from tending 
to diminish, would in reality increase, by adding those 
regrets, of which I had been the author in them, to 
my own original stock." It is painful to witness the 
struggles of a generous spirit endeavoring to suppress 
the anguish thus involuntarily escaping in the warmth 
of affectionate intercourse. This becomes still more 
striking in the contrast exhibited between the assumed 
cheerfulness of much of his correspondence at this 
period and the uniform melancholy tone of his private 
journal, the genuine record of his emotions. 

Fortunately, his taste, refined by intellectual culture, 
and the elevation and spotless purity of his moral 
principles, raised him above the temptations of sensual 
indulgence, in which minds of weaker mould might 
have sought a temporary relief. His soul was steeled 
against the grosser seductions of appetite. The only 
avenue through which his principles could in any way 
be assailed was the understanding ; and it would ap- 
pear, from some dark hints in his correspondence at 
this period, that the rash idea of relieving himself 
from the weight of earthly sorrows by some voluntary 
deed of violence had more than once flitted across his 
mind. It is pleasing to observe with what beautiful 
modesty and simplicity of character he refers his ab- 
stinence from coarser indulgences to his constitutional 
infirmities, and consequent disinclination to them, 



12 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

which, in truth, could be only imputed to the excel- 
lence of his heart and his understanding. In one of 
his letters he remarks " that the benevolence of Nature 
rendered him, in a manner, an exile from many of the 
temptations that infest the minds of ardent youth. 
Whatever his wishes might have been, his benevolent 
destiny had prevented him from running into the fri- 
volities of youth." He ascribes to this cause his love 
of letters, and his predominant anxiety to excel in 
whatever was a glorious subject of competition. "Had 
he been furnished with the nerves and muscles of his 
comrades, it was very far from impossible that he might 
have relinquished intellectual pleasures. Nature had 
benevolently rendered him incapable of encountering 
such severe trials." 

Brown's principal resources for dissipating the mel- 
ancholy which hung over him were his inextinguish- 
able love of letters, and the society of a few friends, 
to whom congeniality of taste and temper had united 
him from early years. In addition to these resources, 
we may mention his fondness for pedestrian rambles, 
which sometimes were of several weeks' duration. In 
the course of these excursions, the circle of his ac- 
quaintance and friends was gradually enlarged. In 
the city of New York, in particular, he contracted an 
intimacy with several individuals of similar age and 
kindred mould with himself. Among these, his ear- 
liest associate was Dr. E. H. Smith, a young gen- 
tleman of great promise in the medical profession. 
Brown had become known to him during the residence 
of the latter as a student in Philadelphia. By him our 
hero was introduced to Mr. Dunlap, who has survived 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 13 

to commemorate the virtues of his friend in a biogra- 
phy already noticed, and to Mr. Johnson, the accom- 
plished author of the New York Law Reports. The 
society of these friends had sufficient attractions to 
induce him to repeat his visit to New York, until at 
length, in the beginning of 1798, he may be said to 
have established his permanent residence there, pass- 
ing much of his time under the same roof with them. 
His amiable manners and accomplishments soon rec- 
ommended him to the notice of other eminent indi- 
viduals. He became a member of a literary society, 
called the Friendly Club, comprehending names which 
have since shed a distinguished lustre over the various 
walks of literature and science. 

The spirits of Brown seemed to be exalted in this 
new atmosphere. His sensibilities found a grateful 
exercise in the sympathies of friendship, and the 
powers of his mind were called into action by col- 
lision with others of similar tone with his own. His 
memory was enriched with the stores of various read- 
ing, hitherto conducted at random, with no higher 
object than temporary amusement or the gratification 
of an indefinite curiosity. He now concentrated his 
attention on some determinate object, and proposed to 
give full scope to his various talents and acquisitions 
in the career of an author, as yet so little travelled in 
our own country. 

His first publication was that before noticed, en- 
titled "Alcui??, a dialogue on the Rights of Women." 
It exhibits the crude and fanciful speculations of a 
theorist who, in his dreams of optimism, charges ex- 
clusively on human institutions the imperfections neces- 

2 



U 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



sarily incident to human nature. The work, with all 
its ingenuity, made little impression on the public : it 
found few purchasers, and made, it may be presumed, 
still fewer converts. 

He soon after began a romance, which he never com- 
pleted, from which his biographer has given copious 
extracts. It is conducted in the epistolary form, and, 
although exhibiting little of his subsequent power 
and passion, is recommended by a graceful and easy 
manner of narration, more attractive than the more 
elaborate and artificial style of his latter novels. 

This abortive attempt was succeeded, in 1798, by 
the publication of Wieland, the first of that remark- 
able series of fictions which flowed in such rapid suc- 
cession from his pen in this and the three following 
years. In this romance, the author, deviating from 
the usual track of domestic or historic incident, pro- 
posed to delineate the powerful workings of passion 
displayed by a mind constitutionally excitable, under 
the control of some terrible and mysterious agency. 
The scene is laid in Pennsylvania. The action takes 
place in a family by the name of Wieland, the princi- 
pal member of which had inherited a melancholy and 
somewhat superstitious constitution of mind, which 
his habitual reading and contemplation deepened into 
a calm but steady fanaticism. This temper is nour- 
ished still farther by the occurrence of certain inex- 
plicable circumstances of ominous import. Strange 
voices are heard by different members of the family, 
sometimes warning them of danger, sometimes an- 
nouncing events seeming beyond the reach of human 
knowledge. The still and solemn hours of night are 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



15 



disturbed by the unearthly summons. The other 
actors of the drama are thrown into strange perplex- 
ity, and an underplot of events is curiously entangled 
by the occurrence of unaccountable sights as well as 
sounds. By the heated fancy of Wieland they are 
referred to supernatural agency. A fearful destiny 
seems to preside over the scene, and to carry the 
actors onward to some awful catastrophe. At length 
the hour arrives. A solemn, mysterious voice an- 
nounces to Wieland that he is now called on to testify 
his submission to the divine will by the sacrifice of 
his earthly affections, — to surrender up the affectionate 
partner of his bosom, on whom he had reposed all his 
hopes of happiness in this life. He obeys the man- 
date of Heaven. The stormy conflict of passion into 
which his mind is thrown, as the fearful sacrifice he is 
about to make calls up all the tender remembrances 
of conjugal fidelity and love, is painted with frightful 
strength of coloring. Although it presents, on the 
whole, as pertinent an example as we could offer from 
any of Brown's writings of the peculiar power and 
vividness of his conceptions, the whole scene is too 
long for insertion here. We will mutilate it, however, 
by a brief extract, as an illustration of our author's 
manner, more satisfactory than any criticism can be. 
Wieland, after receiving the fatal mandate, is repre- 
sented in an apartment alone with his wife. His cour- 
age, or, rather, his desperation, fails him, and he sends 
her, on some pretext, from the chamber. An interval, 
during which his insane passions have time to rally, 
ensues. 

"She returned with a light; I led the way to the 



1 6 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

chamber; she looked round her; she lifted the curtain 
of the bed ; she saw nothing. At length she fixed 
inquiring eyes upon me. The light now enab'ed her 
to discover in my visage what darkness had hitherto 
concealed. Her cares were now transferred from my 
sister to myself, and she said, in a tremulous voice, 
' Wieland ! you are not well ; what ails you ? Can I 
do nothing for you?' That accents and looks so win- 
ning should disarm me of my resolution was to be 
expected. My thoughts were thrown anew into an- 
archy. I spread my hand before my eyes, that I might 
not see her, and answered only by groans. She took 
my other hand between hers, and, pressing it to her 
heart, spoke with that voice which had ever swayed 
my will and wafted away sorrow. ' My friend ! my 
soul's friend ! tell me thy cause of grief. Do I not 
merit to partake with thee in thy cares? Am I not 
thy wife ?' 

"This was too much. I broke from her embrace, 
and retired to a corner of the room. In this pause, 
courage was once more infused into me. I resolved 
to execute my duty. She followed me, and renewed 
her passionate entreaty to know the cause of my dis- 
tress. 

"I raised my head and regarded her with steadfast 
looks. I muttered something about death, and the 
injunctions of my duty. At these words she shrunk 
back, and looked at me with a new expression of 
anguish. After a pause, she clasped her hands and 
exclaimed, 

" ' O Wieland ! Wieland ! God grant that I am mis- 
taken ; but surely something is wrong. I see it ; it is 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. j 7 

too plain ; thou art undone — lost to me and to thy- 
self.' At the same time she gazed on my features 
with intensest anxiety, in hope that different symptoms 
would take place. I replied with vehemence, 'Undone \ 
No; my duty is known, and I thank my God that my 
cowardice is now vanquished, and I have power to 
fulfil it. Catharine ! I pity the weakness of nature ; 
I pity thee, but must not spare. Thy life is claimed 
from my hands : thou must die !' 

"Fear was now added to her grief. 'What mean 
you ? Why talk you of death ? Bethink yourself, 
Wieland ; bethink yourself, and this fit will pass. O ! 
why came I hither? Why did you drag me hither?' 

" 'I brought thee hither to fulfil a divine command. 
I am appointed thy destroyer, and destroy thee I must. ' 
Saying this, I seized her wrists. She shrieked aloud, 
and endeavored to free herself from my grasp, but her 
efforts were vain. 

il ' Surely, surely, Wieland, thou dost not mean it. 
Am I not thy wife? and wouldst thou kill me? Thou 
wilt not ; and yet — I see — thou art Wieland no longer ! 
A fury, resistless and horrible, possesses thee : spare 
me — spare — help — help — ' 

"Till her breath was stopped she shrieked for help 
— for mercy. When she could speak no longer, her 
gestures, her looks, appealed to my compassion. My 
accursed hand was irresolute and tremulous. I meant 
thy death to be sudden, thy struggles to be brief. Alas ! 
my heart was infirm, my resolves mutable. Thrice I 
slackened my grasp, and life kept its hold, though in 
the midst of pangs. Her eyeballs started from their 
sockets. Grimness and distortion took place of all 



1 8 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

that used to bewitch me into transport and subdue me 
into reverence. 

" I was commissioned to kill thee, but not to torment 
thee with the foresight of thy death ; not to multiply 
thy fears and prolong thy agonies. Haggard, and pale, 
and lifeless, at length thou ceasedst to contend with thy 
destiny. 

"This was a moment of triumph. Thus had I suc- 
cessfully subdued the stubbornness of human passions ; 
the victim which had been demanded was given ; the 
deed was done past recall. 

"I lifted the corpse in my arms, and laid it on the 
bed. I gazed upon it with delight. Such was the 
elation of my thoughts that I even broke into laughter. 
I clapped my hands, and exclaimed, 'It is done ! My 
sacred duty is fulfilled ! To that I have sacrificed, O 
my God ! thy last and best gift, my wife !' 

"For a while I thus soared above frailty. I im- 
agined I had set myself forever beyond the reach of 
selfishness, but my imaginations were false. This rap- 
ture quickly subsided. I looked again at my wife. 
My joyous ebullitions vanished, and I asked myself 
who it was whom I saw. Methought it could not be 
Catharine. It could not be the woman who had 
lodged for years in my heart ; who had slept nightly 
in my bosom ; who had borne in her womb, who had 
fostered at her breast, the beings who called me father; 
whom I had watched with delight, and cherished with 
a fondness ever new and perpetually growing: it could 
not be the same. 

"Where was her bloom? These deadly and blood- 
suffused orbs but ill resemble the azure and ecstatic 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



*9 



tenderness of her eyes. The lucid stream that mean- 
dered over that bosom, the glow of love that was wont 
to sit upon that cheek, are much unlike these livid 
stains and this hideous deformity. Alas ! these were 
the traces of agony : the gripe of the assassin had 
been here ! 

" I will not dwell upon my lapse into desperate and 
outrageous sorrow. The breath of Heaven that sus- 
tained me was withdrawn, and I sunk into mere man. 
I leaped from the floor ; I dashed my head against the 
wall ; I uttered screams of horror ; I panted after tor- 
ment and pain. Eternal fire and the bickerings of hell, 
compared with what I felt, were music and a bed of 
roses. 

"I thank my God that this degeneracy was tran- 
sient, — that he deigned once more to raise me aloft. 
I thought upon what I had done as a sacrifice to duty, 
and was calm. My wife was dead ; but I reflected that, 
though this source of human consolation was closed, 
yet others were still open. If the transports of a hus- 
band were no more, the feelings of a father had still 
scope for exercise. When remembrance of their 
mother should excite too keen a pang, I would look 
upon them and be comforted. 

"While I revolved these ideas, new warmth flowed 
in upon my heart. I was wrong. These feelings were 
the growth of selfishness. Of this I was not aware ; 
and, to dispel the mist that obscured my perceptions, 
a new effulgence and a new mandate were necessary. 

"From these thoughts I was recalled by a ray that 
was shot into the room. A voice spake like that which 
I had before heard, 'Thou hast done well; but all is not 



2 o BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

done — the sacrifice is incomplete — thy children must 
be offered — they must perish with their mother !.' " 

This, too, is accomplished by the same remorseless 
arm, although the author has judiciously refrained from 
attempting to prolong the note of feeling, struck with 
so powerful a hand, by the recital of the particulars. 
The wretched fanatic is brought to trial for the mur- 
der, but is acquitted on the ground of insanity. The 
illusion which has bewildered him at length breaks 
on his understanding in its whole truth. He cannot 
sustain the shock, and the tragic tale closes with the 
suicide of the victim of superstition and imposture. 
The key to the whole of this mysterious agency which 
controls the circumstances of the story is — ventrilo- 
quism ! ventriloquism exerted for the very purpose by 
a human fiend, from no motives of revenge or hatred, 
but pure diabolical malice, or, as he would make us 
believe, and the author seems willing to endorse this 
absurd version of it, as a mere practical joke ! The 
reader, who has been gorged with this feast of horrors, 
is tempted to throw away the book in disgust at finding 
himself the dupe of such paltry jugglery ; which, what- 
ever sense be given to the term ventriloquism, is alto- 
gether incompetent to the various phenomena of sight 
and sound with which the story is so plentifully sea- 
soned. We can feel the force of Dryden's imprecation 
when he cursed the inventors of those fifth acts which 
are bound to unravel all the fine mesh of impossibilities 
which the author's wits had been so busy entangling in 
the four preceding. 

The explication of the mysteries of Wieland natu- 
rally suggests the question how far an author is bound 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 21 

to explain the supernaturalities ', if we may so call them, 
of his fictions, and whether it is not better, on the 
whole, to trust to the willing superstition and credulity 
of the reader (of which there is perhaps store enough 
in almost every bosom, at the present enlightened day 
even, for poetical purposes) than to attempt a solution 
on purely natural or mechanical principles. It was 
thought no harm for the ancients to bring the use of 
machinery into their epics, and a similar freedom was 
conceded to the old English dramatists, whose ghosts 
and witches were placed in the much more perilous 
predicament of being subjected to the scrutiny of the 
spectator, whose senses are not near so likely to be 
duped as the sensitive and excited imagination of the 
reader in his solitary chamber. It must be admitted, 
however, that the public of those days, when the 

" Undoubting mind 
Believed the magic wonders that were sung," 

were admirably seasoned for the action of superstition 
in all forms, and furnished, therefore, a most enviable 
audience for the melodramatic artist, whether drama- 
tist or romance-writer. But all this is changed. No 
witches ride the air nowadays, and fairies no longer 
"dance their rounds by the pale moonlight," as the 
worthy Bishop Corbet, indeed, lamented a century 
and a half ago. 

Still, it may be allowed, perhaps, if the scene is laid 
in some remote age or country, to borrow the ancient 
superstitions of the place, and incorporate them into, 
or, at least, color the story with them, without shock- 
ing the well-bred prejudices of the modern reader. Sir 



2 2 BIOGRAPHICAL AXD 

Walter Scott has done this with good effect in more 
than one of his romances, as every one will readily 
call to mind. A fine example occurs in the Boden 
Glass apparition in Waverley, which the great novelist, 
far from attempting to explain on any philosophical 
principles, or even by an intimation of its being the 
mere creation of a feverish imagination, has left as he 
found it, trusting that the reader's poetic feeling will 
readily accommodate itself to the popular superstitions 
of the country he is depicting. This reserve on his 
part, indeed, arising from a truly poetic view of the 
subject and an honest reliance on a similar spirit in 
his reader, has laid him open, with some matter-of-fact 
people, to the imputation of not being wholly un- 
touched himself by the national superstitions. Yet 
how much would the whole scene have lost in its per- 
manent effect if the author had attempted an explana- 
tion of the apparition on the ground of an optical 
illusion not infrequent among the mountain-mists of 
the Highlands, or any other of the ingenious solutions 
so readily at the command of the thoroughbred story- 
teller ! 

It must be acknowledged, however, that this way of 
solving the riddles of romance would hardly be admis- 
sible in a story drawn from familiar scenes and situa- 
tions in modern life, and especially in our own country. 
The lights of education are flung too bright and broad 
over the land to allow any lurking-hole for the shadows 
of a twilight age. So much the worse for the poet and 
the novelist. Their province must now be confined 
to poor human nature, without meddling with the 
"Gorgons and chimeras dire" which floated through 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



2 3 



the bewildered brains of our forefathers, at least on 
the other side of the water. At any rate, if a writer, in 
this broad sunshine, ventures on any sort of diablerie, 
he is forced to explain it by all the thousand con- 
trivances of trap-doors, secret passages, waxen images, 
and other make-shifts from the property-room of Mrs. 
Radcliffe and Company. 

Brown, indeed, has resorted to a somewhat higher 
mode of elucidating his mysteries by a remarkable 
phenomenon of our nature. But the misfortune of 
all these attempts to account for the marvels of the 
story by natural or mechanical causes is, that they are 
very seldom satisfactory, or competent to their object. 
This is eminently the case with the ventriloquism in 
Wieland. Even where they are competent, it may be 
doubted whether the reader who has suffered his cred- 
ulous fancy to be entranced by the spell of the ma- 
gician will be gratified to learn, at the end, by what 
cheap mechanical contrivance he has been duped. 
However this may be, it is certain that a very unfavor- 
able effect, in another respect, is produced on his 
mind, after he is made acquainted with the nature of 
the secret spring by which the machinery is played, 
more especially when one leading circumstance, like 
ventriloquism in Wieland, is made the master-key, as 
it were, by which all the mysteries are to be unlocked 
and opened at once. With this explanation at hand, 
it is extremely difficult to rise to that sensation of mys- 
terious awe and apprehension on which so much of the 
sublimity and general effect of the narrative necessarily 
depends. Instead of such feelings, the only ones which 
can enable us to do full justice to the author's concep- 



24 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

tions, we sometimes, on the contrary, may detect a 
smile lurking in the corner of the mouth as we peruse 
scenes of positive power, from the contrast obviously 
suggested of the impotence of the apparatus and the 
portentous character of the results. The critic, there- 
fore, possessed of the real key to the mysteries of the 
story, if he would do justice to his author's merits, 
must divest himself, as it were, of his previous knowl- 
edge, by fastening his attention on the results, to the 
exclusion of the insignificant means by which they are 
achieved. He will not always find this an easy matter. 
But to return from this rambling digression. In the 
following year, 1799, Brown published his second 
novel, entitled Ormond. The story presents few of 
the deeply agitating scenes and powerful bursts of 
passion which distinguish the first. It is designed to 
exhibit a model of surpassing excellence in a female 
rising superior to all the shocks of adversity and the 
more perilous blandishments of seduction, and who, as 
the scene grows darker and darker around her, seems 
to illumine the whole with the radiance of her celes- 
tial virtues. The reader is reminded of the "patient 
Griselda," so delicately portrayed by the pencils of 
Boccaccio and Chaucer. It must be admitted, how- 
ever, that the contemplation of such a character in the 
abstract is more imposing than the minute details by 
which we attain to the knowledge of it; and although 
there is nothing, we are told, which the gods looked 
down upon with more satisfaction than a brave mind 
struggling with the storms of adversity, yet, when 
these come in the guise of poverty and all the train of 
teasing annoyances in domestic life, the tale, if long 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 25 

protracted, too often produces a sensation of weariness 
scarcely to be compensated by the moral grandeur of 
the spectacle. 

The appearance of these two novels constitutes an 
epoch in the ornamental literature of America. They 
are the first decidedly successful attempts in the walk 
of romantic fiction. They are still farther remarkable 
as illustrating the character and state of society on this 
side of the Atlantic, instead of resorting to the ex- 
hausted springs of European invention. These circum- 
stances, as well as the uncommon powers they displayed 
both of conception and execution, recommended them 
to the notice of the literary world, although their philo- 
sophical method of dissecting passion and analyzing 
motives of action placed them somewhat beyond the 
reach of vulgar popularity. Brown was sensible of the 
favorable impression which he had made, and mentions 
it in one of his epistles to his brother with his usual 
unaffected modesty : "I add somewhat, though not so 
much as I might if I were so inclined, to the number 
of my friends. I find to be the writer of Wieland 
and Ormond is a greater recommendation than I ever 
imagined it would be." 

In the course of the same year, the quiet tenor of 
his life was interrupted by the visitation of that fearful 
pestilence, the yellow fever, which had for several suc- 
cessive years made its appearance in the city of New 
York, but which in 1798 fell upon it with a violence 
similar to that with which it had desolated Philadel- 
phia in 1793. Brown had taken the precaution of 
withdrawing from the latter city, where he then re- 
sided, on its first appearance there. He prolonged 
B 3 



26 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

his stay in New York, however, relying on the healthi- 
ness of the quarter of the town where he lived, and 
the habitual abstemiousness of his diet. His friend 
Smith was necessarily detained there by the duties of 
his profession; and Brown, in answer to the reiterated 
importunities of his absent relatives to withdraw from 
the infected city, refused to do so, on the ground that 
his personal services might be required by the friends 
who remained in it, — a disinterestedness well meriting 
the strength of attachment which he excited in the 
bosom of his companions. 

Unhappily, Brown was right in his prognostics, and 
his services were too soon required in behalf of his 
friend Dr. Smith, who fell a victim to his own benevo- 
lence, having caught the fatal malady from an Italian 
gentleman, a stranger in the city, whom he received, 
when infected with the disease, into his house, relin- 
quishing to him his own apartment. Brown had the 
melancholy satisfaction of performing the last sad 
offices of affection to his dying friend. He himself 
soon became affected with the same disorder ; and it 
was not till after a severe illness that he so far recov- 
ered as to be able to transfer his residence to Perth 
Amboy, the abode of Mr. Dunlap, where a pure and 
invigorating atmosphere, aided by the kind attentions 
of his host, gradually restored him to a sufficient de- 
gree of health and spirits for the prosecution of his 
literary labors. 

The spectacle he had witnessed made too deep an 
impression on him to be readily effaced, and he re- 
solved to transfer his own conceptions of it, while yet 
fresh, to the page of fiction, or, as it might rather be 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



27 



called, of history, for the purpose, as he intimates in 
his preface, of imparting to others some of the fruits 
of the melancholy lesson he had himself experienced. 
Such was the origin of his next novel, Arthur Mervyn ; 
or, Me??wirs of the Year 1793. This was the fatal year 
of the yellow fever in Philadelphia. The action of the 
story is chiefly confined to that city, but seems to be 
prepared with little contrivance, on no regular or sys- 
tematic plan, consisting simply of a succession of inci- 
dents, having little cohesion except in reference to the 
hero, but affording situations of great interest and 
frightful fidelity of coloring. The pestilence wasting 
a thriving and populous city has furnished a topic for 
more than one great master. It will be remembered 
as the terror of every school-boy in the pages of Thu- 
cydides; it forms the gloomy portal to the light and 
airy fictions of Boccaccio ; and it has furnished a sub- 
ject for the graphic pencil of the English novelist De 
Foe, the only one of the three who never witnessed 
the horrors which he paints, but whose fictions wear 
an aspect of reality which history can rarely reach. 

Brown has succeeded in giving the same terrible 
distinctness to his impressions by means of individual 
portraiture. He has, however, not confined himself 
to this, but, by a variety of touches, lays open to our 
view the whole interior of the city of the plague. 
Instead of expatiating on the loathsome symptoms and 
physical ravages of the disease, he selects the most 
striking moral circumstances which attend it ; he 
dwells on the withering sensation that falls so heavily 
on the heart in the streets of the once busy and 
crowded city, now deserted and silent, save only 



28 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

where the wheels of the melancholy hearse are heard 
to rumble along the pavement. Our author not un- 
frequently succeeds in conveying more to the heart 
by the skilful selection of a single circumstance than 
would have flowed from a multitude of petty details. 
It is the art of the great masters of poetry and painting. 

The same year in which Brown produced the first 
part of "Arthur Mervyn," he entered on the publica- 
tion of a periodical entitled The Mo?ithly Magazine 
and American Review, a work that during its brief 
existence, which terminated in the following year, 
afforded abundant evidence of its editor's versatility 
of talent and the ample range of his literary acqui- 
sitions. Our hero was now fairly in the traces of 
authorship. He looked to it as his permanent voca- 
tion ; and the indefatigable diligence with which he 
devoted himself to it may at least serve to show that 
he did not shrink from his professional engagements 
from any lack of industry or enterprise. 

The publication of "Arthur Mervyn" was succeeded 
not long after by that of Edgar Hunt ly ; or, The Adven- 
tures of a Sleepwalker, a romance presenting a greater 
variety of wild and picturesque adventure, with more 
copious delineations of natural scenery, than is to be 
found in his other fictions ; circumstances, no doubt, 
possessing more attractions for the mass of readers 
than the peculiarities of his other novels. Indeed, 
the author has succeeded perfectly in constantly stimu- 
lating the curiosity by a succession of as original inci- 
dents, perils, and hairbreadth escapes as ever flitted 
across a poet's fancy. It is no small triumph of the 
art to be able to maintain the curiosity of the reader 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 29 

unflagging through a succession of incidents which, far 
from being sustained by one predominant passion and 
forming parts of one whole, rely each for its interest on 
its own independent merits. 

The story is laid in the western part of Pennsylvania, 
where the author has diversified his descriptions of 
a simple and almost primitive state of society with 
uncommonly animated sketches of rural scenery. It 
is worth observing how the sombre complexion of 
Brown's imagination, which so deeply tinges his moral 
portraiture, sheds its gloom over his pictures of mate- 
rial nature, raising the landscape into all the severe 
and savage sublimity of a Salvator Rosa. The som- 
nambulism of this novel, which, like the ventriloquism 
of "Wieland," is the moving principle of all the 
machinery, has this advantage over the latter, that it 
does not necessarily impair the effect by perpetually 
suggesting a solution of mysteries, and thus dispelling 
the illusion on whose existence the effect of the whole 
story mainly depends. The adventures, indeed, built 
upon it are not the most probable in the world ; but, 
waiving this, — we shall be well rewarded for such con- 
cession, — there is no farther difficulty. 

The extract already cited by us from the first of our 
author's novels has furnished the reader with an illus- 
tration of his power in displaying the conflict of passion 
under high moral excitement. We will now venture 
another quotation from the work before us, in order 
to exhibit more fully his talent for the description of 
external objects. 

Edgar Huntly, the hero of the story, is represented 
in one of the wild mountain-fastnesses of Norwalk, a 

3* 



3° 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



district in the western part of Pennsylvania. He is 
on the brink of a ravine, from which the only avenue 
lies over the body of a tree thrown across the chasm, 
through whose dark depths below a rushing torrent is 
heard to pour its waters. 

"While occupied with these reflections, my eyes 
were fixed upon the opposite steeps. The tops of the 
trees, waving to and fro in the wildest commotion, and 
their trunks occasionally bending to the blast, which, 
in these lofty regions, blew with a violence unknown 
in the tracts below, exhibited an awful spectacle. At 
length my attention was attracted by the trunk which 
lay across the gulf, and which I had converted into a 
bridge. I perceived that it had already swerved some- 
what from its original position; that every blast broke 
or loosened some of the fibres by which its roots were 
connected with the opposite bank ; and that, if the 
storm did not speedily abate, there was imminent 
danger of its being torn from the rock and precipi- 
tated into the chasm. Thus my retreat would be cut 
off, and the evils from which I was endeavoring to 
rescue another would be experienced by myself. 

"I believed my destiny to hang upon the expedition 
with which I should recross this gulf. The moments 
that were spent in these deliberations were critical, 
and I shuddered to observe that the trunk was held in 
its place by one or two fibres, which were already 
stretched almost to breaking. 

"To pass along the trunk, rendered slippery by the 
wet and unsteadfast by the wind, was eminently dan- 
gerous. To maintain my hold in passing, in defiance 
of the whirlwind, required the most vigorous exertions. 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



31 



For this end, it was necessary to discommode myself 
of my cloak, and of the volume which I carried in the 
pocket of my coat. 

"Just as I had disposed of these encumbrances, and 
had risen from my seat, my attention was again called 
to the opposite steep by the most unwelcome object 
that at this time could possibly occur. Something was 
perceived moving among the bushes and rocks, which, 
for a time, I hoped was nothing more than a raccoon 
or opossum, but which presently appeared to be a pan- 
ther. His gray coat, extended claws, fiery eyes, and 
a cry which he at that moment uttered, and which, 
by its resemblance to the human voice, is peculiarly 
terrific, denoted him to be the most ferocious and 
untamable of that detested race. The industry of 
our hunters has nearly banished animals of prey from 
these precincts. The fastnesses of Norwalk, however, 
could not but afford refuge to some of them. Of late 
I had met them so rarely that my fears were seldom 
alive, and I trod without caution the ruggedest and 
most solitary haunts. Still, however, I had seldom 
been unfurnished in my rambles with the means of 
defence. 

"The unfrequency with which I had lately en- 
countered this foe, and the encumbrance of provision, 
made me neglect, on this occasion, to bring with 
me my usual arms. The beast that was now before 
me, when stimulated by hunger, was accustomed to 
assail whatever could provide him with a banquet of 
blood. He would set upon the man and the deer 
with equal and irresistible ferocity. His sagacity was 
equal to his strength, and he seemed able to dis- 



32 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

cover when his antagonist was armed and prepared for 
defence. 

"My past experience enabled me to estimate the 
full extent of my danger. He sat on the brow of the 
steep, eying the bridge, and apparently deliberating 
whether he should cross it. It was probable that he 
had scented my footsteps thus far, and, should he pass 
over, his vigilance could scarcely fail of detecting my 
asylum. 

"Should he retain his present station, my danger 
was scarcely lessened. To pass over in the face of a 
famished tiger was only to rush upon my fate. The 
falling of the trunk, which had lately been so anxiously 
deprecated, was now with no less solicitude desired. 
Every new gust I hoped would tear asunder its remain- 
ing bands, and, by cutting off all communication be- 
tween the opposite steeps, place me in security. My 
hopes, however, were destined to be frustrated. The 
fibres of the prostrate tree were obstinately tenacious 
of their hold, and presently the animal scrambled 
down the rock and proceeded to cross it. 

" Of all kinds of death, that which now menaced 
me was the most abhorred. To die by disease, or by 
the hand of a fellow-creature, was propitious and le- 
nient in comparison with being rent to pieces by the 
fangs of this savage. To perish in this obscure retreat 
by means so impervious to the anxious curiosity of my 
friends, to lose my portion of existence by so untoward 
and ignoble a destiny, was insupportable. I bitterly 
deplored my rashness in coming hither unprovided for 
an encounter like this. 

"The evil of my present circumstances consisted 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 33 

chiefly in suspense. My death was unavoidable, but 
my imagination had leisure to torment itself by antici- 
pations. One foot of the savage was slowly and cau- 
tiously moved after the other. He struck his claws so 
deeply into the bark that they were with difficulty with- 
drawn. At length he leaped upon the ground. We 
were now separated by an interval of scarcely eight 
feet. To leave the spot where I crouched was impos- 
sible. Behind and beside me the cliff rose perpen- 
dicularly, and before me was this grim and terrible 
visage. I shrunk still closer to the ground, and closed 
my eyes. 

"From this pause of horror I was aroused by the 
noise occasioned by a second spring of the animal. 
He leaped into the pit in which I had so deeply re- 
gretted that I had not taken refuge, and disappeared. 
My rescue was so sudden, and so much beyond my 
belief or my hope, that I doubted for a moment 
whether my senses did not deceive me. This oppor- 
tunity of escape was not to be neglected. I left my 
place and scrambled over the trunk with a precipita- 
tion which had like to have proved fatal. The tree 
groaned and shook under me, the wind blew with 
unexampled violence, and I had scarcely reached the 
opposite steep when the roots were severed from the 
rock, and the whole fell thundering to the bottom of 
the chasm. 

" My trepidations were not speedily quieted. I 
looked back with wonder on my hairbreadth escape, 
and on that singular concurrence of events which had 
placed me in so short a period in absolute security. 
Had the trunk fallen a moment earlier, I should have 

B* 



34 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



been imprisoned on the hill or thrown headlong. Had 
its fall been delayed another moment, I should have 
been pursued ; for the beast now issued from his den, 
and testified his surprise and disappointment by tokens 
the sight of which made my blood run cold. 

" He saw me, and hastened to the verge of the 
chasm. He squatted on his hind legs, and assumed 
the attitude of one preparing to leap. My conster- 
nation was excited afresh by these appearances. It 
seemed at first as if the rift was too wide for any power 
of muscles to carry him in safety over ; but I knew 
the unparalleled agility of this animal, and that his 
experience had made him a better judge of the practi- 
cability of this exploit than I was. 

"Still, there was hope that he would relinquish this 
design as desperate. This hope was quickly at an end. 
He sprung, and his fore legs touched the verge of the 
rock on which I stood. In spite of vehement exertions, 
however, the surface was too smooth and too hard to 
allow him to make good his hold. He fell, and a 
piercing cry uttered below showed that nothing had 
obstructed his descent to the bottom." 

The subsequent narrative leads the hero through a 
variety of romantic adventures, especially with the 
savages, with whom he has several desperate rencoun- 
ters and critical escapes. The track of adventure, 
indeed, strikes into the same wild solitudes of the 
forest that have since been so frequently travelled over 
by our ingenious countryman Cooper. The light in 
which the character of the North American Indian has 
been exhibited by the two writers has little resemblance. 
Brown's sketches, it is true, are few and faint. As far 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



35 



as they go, however, they are confined to such views 
as are most conformable to the popular conceptions, 
bringing into full relief the rude and uncouth linea- 
ments of the Indian character, its cunning, cruelty, 
and unmitigated ferocity, with no intimations of a 
more generous nature. Cooper, on the other hand, 
discards all the coarser elements of savage life, re- 
serving those only of a picturesque and romantic cast, 
and elevating the souls of his warriors by such senti- 
ments of courtesy, high-toned gallantry, and passionate 
tenderness as belong to the riper period of civilization. 
Thus idealized, the portrait, if not strictly that of the 
fierce and untamed son of the forest, is at least suffi- 
ciently true for poetical purposes. Cooper is indeed 
a poet. His descriptions of inanimate nature, no less 
than of savage man, are instinct with the breath of 
poetry. Witness his infinitely various pictures of the 
ocean, or, still more, of the beautiful spirit that rides 
upon its bosom, the gallant ship, which under his 
touches becomes an animated thing, inspired by a 
living soul ; reminding us of the beautiful superstition 
of the simple-hearted natives, who fancied the bark of 
Columbus some celestial visitant, descending on his 
broad pinions from the skies. 

Brown is far less of a colorist. He deals less in 
external nature, but searches the depths of the soul. 
He may be rather called a philosophical than a poetical 
writer ; for, though he has that intensity of feeling 
which constitutes one of the distinguishing attributes 
of the latter, yet in his most tumultuous bursts of 
passion we frequently find him pausing to analyze and 
coolly speculate on the elements - which have raised it. 



3 6 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

This intrusion, indeed, of reason, la raison froide, into 
scenes of the greatest interest and emotion, has some- 
times the unhappy effect of chilling them altogether. 

In 1800 Brown published the second part of his 
Arthur Mervyn, whose occasional displays of energy 
and pathos by no means compensate the violent dislo- 
cations and general improbabilities of the narrative. 
Our author was led into these defects by the unpardon- 
able precipitancy of his composition. Three of his 
romances were thrown off in the course of one year. 
These were written with the printer's devil literally at 
his elbow, one being begun before another was com- 
pleted, and all of them before a regular, well-digested 
plan was devised for their execution. 

The consequences of this curious style of doing 
business are such as might have been predicted. The 
incidents are strung together with about as little con- 
nection as the rhymes in "The House that Jack 
built;" and the whole reminds us of some bizarre, 
antiquated edifice, exhibiting a dozen styles of archi- 
tecture, according to the caprice or convenience of its 
successive owners. 

The reader is ever at a loss for a clue to guide him 
through the labyrinth of strange, incongruous incident. 
It would seem as if the great object of the author was 
to keep alive the state of suspense, on the player's 
principle, in "The Rehearsal," that "on the stage it 
is best to keep the audience in suspense ; for to guess 
presently at the plot or the sense tires them at the end 
of the first act. Now, here every line surprises you, 
and brings in new matter !" Perhaps, however, all this 
proceeds less from calculation than from the embarrass- 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



37 



ment which the novelist feels in attempting a solution 
of his own riddles, and which leads him to put off the 
reader, by multiplying incident after incident, until at 
length, entangled in the complicated snarl of his own 
intrigue, he is finally obliged, when the fatal hour 
arrives, to cut the knot which he cannot unravel. 
There is no other way by which we can account for 
the forced and violent denouements which bring up so 
many of Brown's fictions. Voltaire has remarked, 
somewhere in his Commentaries on Corneille, that 
"an author may write with the rapidity of genius, but 
should correct with scrupulous deliberation." Our 
author seems to have thought it sufficient to comply 
with the first half of the maxim. 

In 1801 Brown published his novel of Clara Howard, 
and in 1804 closed the series with Jane Talbot, first 
printed in England. They are composed in a more 
subdued tone, discarding those startling preternatural 
incidents of which he had made such free use in his 
former fictions. In the preface to his first romance, 
"Wieland," he remarks, in allusion to the mystery 
on which the story is made to depend, that "it is a 
sufficient vindication of the writer if history furnishes 
one parallel fact." But the French critic, who tells us 
le vrai peut quelquefois 11 etre pas vraisemblable, has, 
with more judgment, condemned this vicious recur- 
rence to extravagant and improbable incident. Truth 
cannot always be pleaded in vindication of the author 
of a fiction any more than of a libel. Brown seems to 
have subsequently come into the same opinion ; for, 
in a letter addressed to his brother James, after the 
publication of "Edgar Huntly," he observes, "Your 

4 



38 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

remarks upon the gloominess and out-of-nature inci- 
dents of 'Huntly,' if they be not just in their full 
extent, are doubtless such as most readers will make, 
which alone is a sufficient reason for dropping the 
doleful tone and assuming a cheerful one. or, at least, 
substituting moral causes and daily incidents in place 
of the prodigious or the singular. I shall not fall 
hereafter into that strain." The two last novels of 
our author, however, although purified from the more 
glaring defects of the preceding, were so inferior in 
their general power and originality of conception that 
they never rose to the same level in public favor. 

In the year 1801 Brown returned to his native city, 
Philadelphia, where he established his residence in the 
family of his brother. Here he continued, steadily 
pursuing his literary avocations, and in 1803 under- 
took the conduct of a periodical, entitled The Literary 
Magazine and American Register. A great change 
had taken place in his opinions on more than one 
important topic connected with human life and hap- 
piness, and, indeed, in his general tone of thinking, 
since abandoning his professional career. Brighter 
prospects, no doubt, suggested to him more cheerful 
considerations. Instead of a mere dreamer in the 
world of fancy, he had now become a practical man : 
larger experience and deeper meditation had shown 
him the emptiness of his Utopian theories; and, though 
his sensibilities were as ardent and as easily enlisted as 
ever in the cause of humanity, his schemes of ameliora- 
tion were built upon, not against, the existing institu- 
tions of society. The enunciation of the principles on 
which the periodical above alluded to was to be con- 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 39 

ducted is so honorable every way to his heart and his 
understanding that we cannot refrain from making a 
brief extract from it : 

" In an age like this, when the foundations of re- 
ligion and morality have been so boldly attacked, it 
seems necessary, in announcing a work of this nature, 
to be particularly explicit as to the path which the 
editor means to pursue. He therefore avows himself 
to be, without equivocation or reserve, the ardent 
friend and the willing champion of the Christian re- 
ligion. Christian piety he reveres as the highest ex- 
cellence of human beings ; and the amplest reward he 
can seek for his labor is the consciousness of having in 
some degree, however inconsiderable, contributed to 
recommend the practice of religious duties. As in the 
conduct of this work a supreme regard will be paid to 
the interests of religion and morality, he will scrupu- 
lously guard against all that dishonors and impairs 
that principle. Every thing that savors of indelicacy 
or licentiousness will be rigorously proscribed. His 
poetical pieces may be dull, but they shall at least be 
free from voluptuousness or sensuality; and his prose, 
whether seconded or not by genius and knowledge, 
shall scrupulously aim at the promotion of public and 
private virtue." 

During his abode in New York our author had 
formed an attachment to an amiable and accomplished 
young lady, Miss Elizabeth Linn, daughter of the ex- 
cellent and highly-gifted Presbyterian divine, Dr. Wil- 
liam Linn, of that city. Their mutual attachment, in 
which the impulses of the heart were sanctioned by the 
understanding, was followed by their marriage in No- 



4o 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



vember, 1804, after which he never again removed his 
residence from Philadelphia. 

With the additional responsibilities of his new sta- 
tion, he pursued his literary labors with increased dili- 
gence. He projected the plan of an Annual Register, 
the first work of the kind in the country, and in 1806 
edited the first volume of the publication, which was 
undertaken at the risk of an eminent bookseller of 
Philadelphia, Mr. Conrad, who had engaged his edi- 
torial labors in the conduct of the former Magazine, 
begun in 1803. When it is considered that both these 
periodicals were placed under the superintendence of 
one individual, and that he bestowed such indefati- 
gable attention on them that they were not only pre- 
pared, but a large portion actually executed, by his 
own hands, we shall form no mean opinion of the 
extent and variety of his stores of information and his 
facility in applying them. Both works are replete with 
evidences of the taste and erudition of their editor, em- 
bracing a wide range of miscellaneous articles, essays, 
literary criticism, and scientific researches. The his- 
torical portion of "The Register" in particular, com- 
prehending, in addition to the political annals of the 
principal states of Europe and of our own country, an 
elaborate inquiry into the origin and organization of 
our domestic institutions, displays a discrimination in 
the selection of incidents, and a good faith and candor 
in the mode of discussing them, that entitle it to great 
authority as a record of contemporary transactions. 
Eight volumes were published of the first-mentioned 
periodical, and the latter was continued under his di- 
rection till the end of the fifth volume, 1809. 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 41 

In addition to these regular and, as they may be 
called, professional labors, he indulged his prolific pen 
in various speculations, both of a literary and political 
character, many of which appeared in the pages of the 
"Portfolio." Among other occasional productions, 
we may notice a beautiful biographical sketch of his 
wife's brother, Dr. J. B. Linn, pastor of the Presby- 
terian church in Philadelphia, whose lamented death 
occurred in the year succeeding Brown's marriage. 
We must not leave out of the account three elaborate 
and extended pamphlets, published between 1803 and 
1809, on political topics of deep interest to the com- 
munity at that time. The first of these, on the cession 
of Louisiana to the French, soon went into a second 
edition. They all excited general attention at the 
time of their appearance by the novelty of their argu- 
ments, the variety and copiousness of their informa- 
tion, the liberality of their views, the independence, 
so rare at that day, of foreign prejudices, the exemp- 
tion, still rarer, from the bitterness of party spirit, 
and, lastly, the tone of loyal and heartfelt patriotism 
— a patriotism without cant — with which the author 
dwells on the expanding glory and prosperity of his 
country in a strain of prophecy that it is our boast has 
now become history. 

Thus occupied, Brown's situation seemed now to 
afford him all the means for happiness attainable in 
this life. His own labors secured to him an honor- 
able independence and a high reputation, which, to 
a mind devoted to professional or other intellectual 
pursuits, is usually of far higher estimation than gain. 
Round his own fireside he found ample scope for the 

4* 



42 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

exercise of his affectionate sensibilities, while the tran- 
quil pleasures of domestic life proved the best possible 
relaxation for a mind wearied by severe intellectual 
effort. His grateful heart was deeply sensible to the 
extent of his blessings ; and in more than one letter 
he indulges in a vein of reflection which shows that 
his only solicitude was from the fear of their insta- 
bility. His own health furnished too well-grounded 
cause for such apprehensions. 

We have already noticed that he set out in life with 
a feeble constitution. His sedentary habits and in- 
tense application had not, as it may well be believed, 
contributed to repair the defects of Nature. He had 
for some time shown a disposition to pulmonary com- 
plaints, and had raised blood more than once, which he 
in vain endeavored to persuade himself did not proceed 
from the lungs. As the real character of the disease 
disclosed itself in a manner not to be mistaken, his 
anxious friends would have persuaded him to cross the 
water in the hope of re-establishing his health by a 
seasonable change of climate. But Brown could not 
endure the thoughts of so long a separation from his 
beloved family, and he trusted to the effect of a tem- 
porary abstinence from business, and of one of those 
excursions into the country by which he had so often 
recruited his health and spirits. 

In the summer of 1809 he made a tour into New 
Jersey and New York. A letter addressed to one of 
his family from the banks of the Hudson, during this 
journey, exhibits in melancholy colors how large a 
portion of his life had been clouded by disease, which 
now, indeed, was too oppressive to admit of any other 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 43 

alleviation than what he could find in the bosom of his 
own family. 

"My dearest Mary, — Instead of wandering about 
and viewing more nearly a place that affords very 
pleasing landscapes, here am I, hovering over the 
images of wife, children, and sisters. I want to write 
to you and home ; and, though unable to procure 
paper enough to form a letter, I cannot help saying 
something even on this scrap. 

"I am mortified to think how incurious and inact- 
ive a mind has fallen to my lot. I left home with 
reluctance. If I had not brought a beloved part of my 
home along with me, I should probably have not left it 
at all. At a distance from home, my enjoyments, my 
affections, are beside you. If swayed by mere inclina- 
tion, I should not be out of your company a quarter 
of an hour between my parting and returning hour ; 
but I have some mercy on you and Susan, and a due 
conviction of my want of power to beguile your vacant 
hour with amusement or improve it by instruction. 
Even if I were ever so well, and if my spirits did not 
continually hover on the brink of dejection, my talk 
could only make you yawn ; as things are, my company 
can only tend to create a gap indeed. 

"When have I known that lightness and vivacity 
of mind which the divine flow of health, even in 
calamity, produces in some men, and would produce 
in me, no doubt, — at least, when not soured by misfor- 
tune ? Never ; scarcely ever ; not longer than half an 
hour at a time since I have called myself man, and not 
a moment since I left you." 



44 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

Finding these brief excursions productive of no salu- 
tary change in his health, he at length complied with 
the entreaties of his friends, and determined to try the 
effect of a voyage to Europe in the following spring. 
That spring he was doomed never to behold. About 
the middle of November he was taken with a violent 
pain in his left side, for which he was bled. From that 
time forward he was confined to his chamber. His 
malady was not attended with the exemption from 
actual pain with which Nature seems sometimes willing 
to compensate the sufferer for the length of its duration. 
His sufferings were incessant and acute ; and they were 
supported not only without a murmur, but with an 
appearance of cheerfulness to which the hearts of his 
friends could but ill respond. He met the approach 
of death in the true spirit of Christian philosophy. No 
other dread but that of separation from those dear to 
him on earth had power to disturb his tranquillity for a 
moment. But the temper of his mind in his last hours 
is best disclosed in a communication from that faithful 
partner who contributed more than any other to support 
him through them. "He always felt for others more 
than for himself; and the evidences of sorrow in those 
around him, which could not at all times be suppressed, 
appeared to affect him more than his own sufferings. 
Whenever he spoke of the probability of a fatal termi- 
nation to his disease, it was in an indirect and covert 
manner, as, ' you must do so and so when I am absent,' 
or 'when I am asleep.' He surrendered not up one 
faculty of his soul but with his last breath. He saw 
death in every step of his approach, and viewed him 
as a messenger that brought with him no terrors. He 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 45 

frequently expressed his resignation ; but his resigna- 
tion was not produced by apathy or pain ; for, while 
he bowed with submission to the Divine will, he felt 
with the keenest sensibility his separation from those 
who made this world but too dear to him. Towards the 
last he spoke of death without disguise, and appeared 
to wish to prepare his friends for the event which he 
felt to be approaching. A few days previous to his 
change, as sitting up in the bed, he fixed his eyes on 
the sky, and desired not to be spoken to until he first 
spoke. In this position, and with a serene counte- 
nance, he continued for some minutes, and then said 
to his wife, ' When I desired you not to speak to me, I 
had the most transporting and sublime feelings I have 
ever experienced ; I wanted to enjoy them, and know 
how long they would last ;' concluding with requesting 
her to remember the circumstance." 

A visible change took place in him on the morning 
of the 19th of.February, 1810, and he caused his family 
to be assembled around his bed, when he took leave of 
each one of them in the most tender and impressive 
manner. He lingered, however, a few days longer, 
remaining in the full possession of his faculties to the 
2 2d of the month, when he expired without a struggle. 
He had reached the thirty-ninth year of his age the 
month preceding his death. The family which he left 
consisted of a wife and four children. 

There was nothing striking in Brown's personal ap- 
pearance. His manners, however, were distinguished 
by a gentleness and unaffected simplicity which ren- 
dered them extremely agreeable. He possessed collo- 
quial powers which do not always fall to the lot of the 



46 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

practised and ready writer. His rich and various ac- 
quisitions supplied an unfailing fund for the edification 
of his hearers. They did not lead him, however, to 
affect an air of superiority, or to assume too prominent 
a part in the dialogue, especially in large or mixed 
company, where he was rather disposed to be silent, 
reserving the display of his powers for the unrestrained 
intercourse of friendship. He was a stranger not only 
to base and malignant passions, but to the paltry jeal- 
ousies which sometimes sour the intercourse of men of 
letters. On the contrary, he was ever prompt to do 
ample justice to the merits of others. His heart was 
warm with the feeling of universal benevolence. Too 
sanguine and romantic views had exposed him to some 
miscalculations and consequent disappointments in 
youth, from which, however, he was subsequently re- 
trieved by the strength of his understanding, which, 
combining with what may be called his natural eleva- 
tion of soul, enabled him to settle the soundest prin- 
ciples for the regulation of his opinions and conduct 
in after-life. His reading was careless and desultory, 
but his appetite was voracious; and the great amount 
of miscellaneous information which he thus amassed 
was all demanded to supply the outpourings of his 
mind in a thousand channels of entertainment and 
instruction. His unwearied application is attested by 
the large amount of his works, large even for the 
present day, when mind seems to have caught the 
accelerated movement so generally given to the opera- 
tions of machinery. The whole number of Brown's 
printed works, comprehending his editorial as well as 
original productions, to the former of which his own 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



47 



pen contributed a very disproportionate share, is not 
less than four-and-twenty printed volumes, not to 
mention various pamphlets, anonymous contributions 
to divers periodicals, as well as more than one com- 
pilation of laborious research which he left unfinished 
at his death. 

Of this vast amount of matter, produced within the 
brief compass of little more than ten years, that por- 
tion on which his fame as an author must permanently 
rest is his novels. We have already entered too mi- 
nutely into the merits of these productions to require 
any thing farther than a few general observations. 
They may probably claim to be regarded as having 
first opened the way to the successful cultivation of 
romantic fiction in this country. Great doubts were 
long entertained of our capabilities for immediate suc- 
cess in this department. We had none of the buoyant, 
stirring associations of a romantic age ; none of the 
chivalrous pageantry, the feudal and border story, or 
Robin Hood adventure; none of the dim, shadowy 
superstitions, and the traditional legends, which had 
gathered like moss round every stone, hill, and valley 
of the olden countries. Every thing here wore a 
spick-and-span new aspect, and lay in the broad, 
garish sunshine of every-day life. We had none of the 
picturesque varieties of situation or costume ; every 
thing lay on the same dull, prosaic level : in short, we 
had none of the most obvious elements of poetry: at 
least so it appeared to the vulgar eye. It required the 
eye of genius to detect the rich stores of romantic and 
poetic interest that lay beneath the crust of society. 
Brown was aware of the capabilities of our country, 



48 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

and the poverty of the results he was less inclined to 
impute to the soil than to the cultivation of it : at least 
this would appear from some remarks dropped in his 
correspondence in 1794, several years before he broke 
ground in this field himself. "It used to be a favorite 
maxim with me, that the genius of a poet should be 
sacred to the glory of his country. How far this rule 
can be reduced to practice by an American bard, how 
far he can prudently observe it, and what success has 
crowned the efforts of those who, in their composi- 
tions, have shown that they have not been unmindful 
of it, is perhaps not worth the inquiry. 

"Does it not appear to you that to give poetry a 
popular currency and universal reputation a particular 
cast of manners and state of civilization is necessary? 
I have sometimes thought so; but perhaps it is an 
error, and the want of popular poems argues only the 
demerit of those who have already written, or some 
defect in their works, which unfits them for every taste 
or understanding." 

The success of our author's experiment, which was 
entirely devoted to American subjects, fully established 
the soundness of his opinions, which have been abun- 
dantly confirmed by the prolific pens of Irving, Cooper, 
Sedgwick, and other accomplished writers, who in their 
diversified sketches of national character and scenery 
have shown the full capacity of our country for all the 
purposes of fiction. Brown does not direct himself, 
like them, to the illustration of social life and charac- 
ter. He is little occupied with the exterior forms of 
society. He works in the depths of the heart, dwelling 
less on human action than the sources of it. He has 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



49 



been said to have formed himself on Godwin. In- 
deed, he openly avowed his admiration of that emi- 
nent writer, and has certainly in some respects adopted 
his mode of operation, studying character with a philo- 
sophic rather than a poetic eye. But there is no servile 
imitation in all this. He has borrowed the same torch, 
indeed, to read the page of human nature, but the les- 
son he derives from it is totally different. His great 
object seems to be to exhibit the soul in scenes of 
extraordinary interest. For this purpose, striking and 
perilous situations are devised, or circumstances of 
strong moral excitement, a troubled conscience, par- 
tial gleams of insanity, or bodings of imaginary evil, 
which haunt the soul and force it into all the agonies 
of terror. In the midst of the fearful strife, we are 
coolly invited to investigate its causes and all the va- 
rious phenomena which attend it ; every contingency, 
probability, nay, possibility, however remote, is dis- 
cussed and nicely balanced. The heat of the reader 
is seen to evaporate in this cold-blooded dissection, 
in which our author seems to rival Butler's hero, who, 

" Profoundly skilled in analytic, 
Could distinguish and divide 
A hair 'twixt south and southwest side." 

We are constantly struck with the strange contrast of 
over-passion and over-reasoning. But perhaps, after 
all, these defects could not be pruned away from 
Brown's composition without detriment to his peculiar 
excellences. Si non errasset, fecerat ille minus. If 
so, we may willingly pardon the one for the sake of 
the other. 

c 5 



5° 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



We cannot close without adverting to our author's 
style. He bestowed great pains on the formation of 
it, but, in our opinion, without great success, at least 
in his novels. It has an elaborate, factitious air, con- 
trasting singularly with the general simplicity of his 
taste and the careless rapidity of his composition. 
We are aware, indeed, that works of imagination may 
bear a higher flush of color, a poetical varnish, in 
short, that must be refused to graver and more studied 
narrative. No writer has been so felicitous in reach- 
ing the exact point of good taste in this particular as 
Scott, who on a groundwork of prose may be said to 
have enabled his readers to breathe an atmosphere of 
poetry. More than one author, on the other hand, as 
Florian, in French, for example, and Lady Morgan, 
in English, in their attempts to reach this middle re- 
gion, are eternally fluttering on the wing of sentiment, 
equally removed from good prose and good poetry. 

Brown, perhaps willing to avoid this extreme, has 
fallen into the opposite one, forcing his style into un- 
natural vigor and condensation. Unusual and pedantic 
epithets, and elliptical forms of expression, in perpet- 
ual violation of idiom, are resorted to at the expense 
of simplicity and nature. He seems averse to telling 
simple things in a simple way. Thus, for example, we 
have such expressions as these: "I was fraught with 
the persuasion that my life was endangered." " The 
outer door was ajar. I shut it with trembling eager- 
ness, and drew every bolt that appended X.o it." " Flis 
brain seemed to swell beyond its continent." "I 
waited till their slow and hoarser inspirations showed 
them to be both asleep. Just then, on changing my 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES, 



51 



position, my head struck against some things which 
depended from the ceiling of the closet." ''It was 
still dark, but my sleep was at an end, and, by a com- 
mon apparatus (tinder-box?) that lay beside my bed, 
I could instantly produce a light." "On recover- 
ing from deliqnhun, you found it where it had been 
dropped." It is unnecessary to multiply examples 
which we should not have adverted to at all had not 
our opinions in this matter been at variance with those 
of more than one respectable critic. This sort of 
language is no doubt in very bad taste. It cannot be 
denied, however, that although these defects are suffi- 
ciently general to give a coloring to the whole of his 
composition, yet his works afford many passages of 
undeniable eloquence and rhetorical beauty. It must 
be remembered, too, that his novels were his first pro- 
ductions, thrown off with careless profusion, and ex- 
hibiting many of the defects of an immature mind, 
which longer experience and practice might have cor- 
rected. Indeed, his later writings are recommended 
by a more correct and natural phraseology, although it 
must be allowed that the graver topics to which they 
are devoted, if they did not authorize, would at least 
render less conspicuous any studied formality and 
artifice of expression. 

These verbal blemishes, combined with defects al- 
ready alluded to in the development of his plots, but 
which all relate to the form rather than the fond of his 
subject, have made our author less extensively popular 
than his extraordinary powers would have entitled him 
to be. His peculiar merits, indeed, appeal to a higher 
order of criticism than is to be found in ordinary and 



52 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

superficial readers. Like the productions of Cole- 
ridge or Wordsworth, they seem to rely on deeper 
sensibilities than most men possess, and tax the reason- 
ing powers more severely than is agreeable to readers 
who resort to works of fiction only as an epicurean 
indulgence. The number of their admirers is there- 
fore necessarily more limited than that of writers of 
less talent, who have shown more tact in accommo- 
dating themselves to the tone of popular feeling or 
prejudice. 

But we are unwilling to part, with any thing like a 
tone of disparagement lingering on our lips, with the 
amiable author to whom our rising literature is under 
such large and various obligations ; who first opened 
a view into the boundless fields of fiction which sub- 
sequent adventurers have successfully explored ; who 
has furnished so much for our instruction in the several 
departments of history and criticism, and has rendered 
still more effectual service by kindling in the bosom of 
the youthful scholar the same generous love of letters 
which glowed in his own ; whose writings, in fine, 
have uniformly inculcated the pure and elevated mo- 
rality exemplified in his life. The only thing we 
can regret is that a life so useful should have been so 
short, if, indeed, that can be considered short which 
has done so much towards attaining life's great end, 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



53 



ASYLUxM FOR THE BLIND.* 

(July, 1830.) 

There is nothing in which the moderns surpass the 
ancients more conspicuously than in their noble pro- 
visions for the relief of indigence and distress. The 
public policy of the ancients seems to have embraced 
only whatever might promote the aggrandizement or 
the direct prosperity of the state, and to have cared 
little for those unfortunate beings who, from disease 
or incapacity of any kind, were disqualified from con- 
tributing to this. But the beneficent influence of 
Christianity, combined with the general tendency of 
our social institutions, has led to the recognition of 
rights in the individual as sacred as those of the com- 
munity, and has suggested manifold provisions for 
personal comfort and happiness. 

The spirit of benevolence, thus widely, and often- 
times judiciously, exerted, continued until a very recent 
period, however, strangely insensible to the claims of a 
large class of objects to whom nature, and no miscon- 
duct or imprudence of their own, as is too often the 
case with the subjects of public charity, had denied 
some of the most estimable faculties of man. No 

* An Act to Incorporate the New England Asylum for the Blind. 
Approved March 2d, 1829. 

5* 



54 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

suitable institutions, until the close of the last century, 
have been provided for the nurture of the deaf and 
dumb, or the blind. Immured within hospitals and 
almshouses, like so many lunatics and incurables, they 
have been delivered over, if they escaped the physical, 
to all the moral contagion too frequently incident to 
such abodes, and have thus been involved in a mental 
darkness far more deplorable than their bodily one. 

This injudicious treatment has resulted from the erro- 
neous principle of viewing these unfortunate beings as 
an absolute burden on the public, utterly incapable of 
contributing to their own subsistence or of ministering 
in any degree to their own intellectual wants. Instead, 
however, of being degraded by such unworthy views, 
they should have been regarded as, what in truth they 
are, possessed of corporeal and mental capacities per- 
fectly competent, under proper management, to the 
production of the most useful results. If wisdom from 
one entrance was quite shut out, other avenues for its 
admission still remained to be opened. 

In order to give effective aid to persons in this 
predicament, it is necessary to place ourselves as far as 
possible in their peculiar situation, to consider to what 
faculties this insulated condition is, on the whole, most 
favorable, and in what direction they can be exercised 
with the best chance of success. Without such fore- 
sight, all our endeavors to aid them will only put them 
upon efforts above their strength, and result in serious 
mortification. 

The blind, from the cheerful ways of men cut off, are 
necessarily excluded from the busy theatre of human 
action. Their infirmity, however, which consigns them 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



55 



to darkness, and often to solitude, would seem favor- 
able to contemplative habits and to the pursuits of 
abstract science and pure speculation. Undisturbed 
by external objects, the mind necessarily turns within, 
and concentrates its ideas on any point of investiga- 
tion with greater intensity and perseverance. It is 
no uncommon thing, therefore, to find persons setting 
apart the silent hours of the evening for the purpose 
of composition or other purely intellectual exercise. 
Malebranche, when he wished to think intensely, used 
to close his shutters in the daytime, excluding every 
ray of light ; and hence Democritus is said to have 
put out his eyes in order that he might philosophize 
the better, — a story the veracity of which Cicero, who 
relates it, is prudent enough not to vouch for. 

Blindness must also be exceedingly favorable to 
the discipline of the memory. Whoever has had the 
misfortune, from any derangement of the organ, to 
be compelled to derive his knowledge of books less 
from the eye than the ear. will feel the truth of this. 
The difficulty of recalling what has once escaped, of 
reverting to or dwelling on the passages read aloud by 
another, compels the hearer to give undivided attention 
to the subject, and to impress it more forcibly on his 
own mind by subsequent and methodical reflection. 
Instances of the cultivation of this facultv to an ex- 
traordinary extent have been witnessed among the 
blind, and it has been most advantageously applied to 
the pursuit of abstract science, especially mathematics. 

One of the most eminent illustrations of these re- 
marks is the well-known history of Saunderson, who, 
though deprived in his infancy not only of sight, but 



56 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



of the organ itself, contrived to become so well ac- 
quainted with the Greek tongue as to read the works of 
the ancient mathematicians in the original. He made 
such advances in the higher departments of the science 
that he was appointed, " though not matriculated at 
the University," to fill the chair which a short time pre- 
vious had been occupied by Sir Isaac Newton at Cam- 
bridge. The lectures of this blind professor on the 
most abstruse points of the Newtonian philosophy, and 
especially on optics, naturally filled his audience with 
admiration ; and the perspicuity with which he com- 
municated his ideas is said to have been unequalled. 
He was enabled, by the force of his memory, to per- 
form many long operations in arithmetic, and to carry 
in his mind the most complex geometrical figures. As, 
however, it became necessary to supply the want of 
vision by some symbols which might be sensible to the 
touch, he contrived a table in which pins, whose value 
was determined principally by their relative position to 
each other, served him instead of figures, while for his 
diagrams he employed pegs, inserted at the requisite 
angles to each other, representing the lines by threads 
drawn around them. He was so expert in the use of 
these materials that when performing his calculations 
he would change the position of the pins with nearly 
the same facility that another person would indite 
figures, and when disturbed in an operation would 
afterwards resume it again, ascertaining the posture in 
which he had left it by passing his hand carefully over 
the table. To such shifts and inventions does human 
ingenuity resort when stimulated by the thirst of 
knowledge; as the plant, when thrown into shade on 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



57 



one side, sends forth its branches eagerly in that 
direction where the light is permitted to fall upon it. 

In like manner, the celebrated mathematician Euler 
continued, for many years after he became blind, to 
indite and publish the results of his scientific labors, 
and at the time of his decease left nearly a hundred 
memoirs ready for the press, most of which have since 
been given to the world. An example of diligence 
equally indefatigable, though turned in a different 
channel, occurs in our contemporary Huber, who has 
contributed one of the most delightful volumes within 
the compass of natural history, and who, if he em- 
ployed the eyes of another, guided them in their 
investigation to the right results by the light of his 
own mind. 

Blindness would seem to be propitious, also, to the 
exercise of the inventive powers. Hence poetry, from 
the time of Thamyris and the blind Maeonides down to 
the Welsh harper and the ballad-grinder of our day, has 
been assigned as the peculiar province of those bereft of 
vision, 

" As the wakeful bird 
Sings darkling, and, in shadiest cover hid, 
Tunes her nocturnal note." 

The greatest epic poem of antiquity was probably, as 
that of the moderns was certainly, composed in dark- 
ness. It is easy to understand how the man who has 
once seen can recall and body forth in his conceptions 
new combinations of material beauty; but it would 
seem scarcely possible that one born blind, excluded 
from all acquaintance with "colored nature," as Con- 
dillac finely styles it, should excel in descriptive poetry. 



5 8 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

Yet there are eminent examples of this ; among others, 
that of Blacklock, whose verses abound in the most 
agreeable and picturesque images. Yet he could have 
formed no other idea of colors than was conveyed by 
their moral associations, the source, indeed, of most 
of the pleasures we derive from descriptive poetry. 
It was thus that he studied the variegated aspect of 
nature, and read in it the successive revolutions of 
the seasons, their freshness, their prime, and decay. 

Mons. Guillie, in an interesting essay on the instruc- 
tion of the blind, to which we shall have occasion re- 
peatedly to refer, quotes an example of the association 
of ideas in regard to colors, which occurred in one of 
his own pupils, who, in reciting the well-known pas- 
sage in Horace, " rubente dexter a saeras jaculatus 
arces" translated the first two words by "fiery" or 
"burning right hand." On being requested to render 
it literally, he called it "red right hand," and gave as 
the reason for his former version that he could form no 
positive conception of a red color; but that, as fire was 
said to be red, he connected the idea of heat with this 
color, and had therefore interpreted the wrath of Jupi- 
ter, demolishing town and tower, by the epithet "fiery 
or burning;" for "when people are angry," he added, 
" they are hot, and when they are hot, they must of 
course be red." He certainly seems to have formed a 
much more accurate notion of red than Locke's blind 
man. 

But while a gift for poetry belongs only to the in- 
spired few, and while many have neither taste nor 
talent for mathematical or speculative science, it is a 
consolation to reflect that the humblest individual who 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 59 

is destitute of sight may so far supply this deficiency 
by the perfection of the other senses as by their aid to 
attain a considerable degree of intellectual culture, as 
well as a familiarity with some of the most useful 
mechanic arts. It will be easier to conceive to what 
extent the perceptions of touch and hearing may be 
refined if we reflect how far that of sight is sharpened 
by exclusive reliance on it in certain situations. Thus 
the mariner descries objects at night, and at a distance 
upon the ocean, altogether imperceptible to the un- 
practised eye of a landsman. And the North Amer- 
ican Indian steers his course undeviatingly through 
the trackless wilderness, guided only by such signs as 
escape the eye of the most inquisitive white man. 

In like manner, the senses of hearing and feeling 
are capable of attaining such a degree of perfection in 
a blind person that by them alone he can distinguish 
his various acquaintances, and even the presence of 
persons whom he has but rarely met before, the size of 
the apartment, and the general locality of the spots in 
which he may happen to be, and guide himself safely 
across the most solitary districts and amid the throng 
of towns. Dr. Bew, in a paper in the Manchester Col- 
lection of Memoirs, gives an account of a blind man 
of his acquaintance in Derbyshire, who was much used 
as a guide for travellers in the night over certain in- 
tricate roads, and particularly when the tracks were 
covered with snow. This same man was afterwards 
employed as a projector and surveyor of roads in that 
county. We well remember a blind man in the neigh- 
boring town of Salem, who officiated some twenty 
years since as the town crier, when that functionary 



6o BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

performed many of the advertising duties now usurped 
by the newspaper, making his diurnal round, and 
stopping with great precision at every corner, trivium 
or quodrivium, to "chime his melodious twang." Yet 
this feat, the familiarity of which prevented it from oc- 
casioning any surprise, could have resulted only from 
the nicest observation of the undulations of the ground, 
or by an attention to the currents of air, or the differ- 
ent sound of the voice or other noises in these open- 
ings, signs altogether lost upon the man of eyes. 

Mons. Guillie mentions several apparently well-at- 
tested anecdotes of blind persons who had the power 
of discriminating colors by the touch. One of the in- 
dividuals noticed by him, a Dutchman, was so expert 
in this way that he was sure to come off conqueror at 
the card-table by the knowledge which he thus ob- 
tained of his adversary's hand whenever it came to his 
turn to deal. This power of discrimination of colors, 
which seems to be a gift only of a very few of the finer- 
fingered gentry, must be founded on the different con- 
sistency or smoothness of the ingredients used in the 
various dyes. A more certain method of ascertaining 
these colors, that of tasting or touching them with the 
tongue, is frequently resorted to by the blind, who by 
this means often distinguish between those analogous 
colors, as black and dark blue, red and pink, which, 
having the greatest apparent affinity, not unfrequently 
deceive the eye. 

Diderot, in an ingenious letter on the blind, a T usage 
de ceux qui voient, has given a circumstantial narration 
of his visit to a blind man at Puisseaux, the son of a 
professor in the University of Paris, and well known in 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 61 

his day from the various accomplishments and manual 
dexterity which he exhibited, remarkable in a person 
in his situation. Being asked what notion he had 
formed of an eye, he replied, " I conceive it to be an 
organ on which the air produces the same effect as this 
staff on my hand. If, when you are looking at an 
object, I should interpose any thing between your eyes 
and that object, it would prevent you from seeing it. 
And I am in the same predicament when I seek one 
thing with my staff and come across another." An 
explanation, says Diderot, as lucid as any which could 
be given by Descartes, who, it is singular, attempts, 
in his Dioptrics, to explain the analogy between the 
senses of feeling and seeing by figures of men blind- 
folded, groping their way with staffs in their hands. 
This same intelligent personage became so familiar with 
the properties of touch that he seems to have accounted 
them almost equally valuable with those of vision. On 
being interrogated if he felt a great desire to have 
eyes, he answered, ''Were it not for the mere gratifica- 
tion of curiosity, I think I should do as well to wish 
for long arms. It seems to me that my hands would 
inform me better of what is going on in the moon than 
your eyes and telescopes ; and then the eyes lose the 
power of vision more readily than the hands that of 
feeling. It would be better to perfect the organ which 
I have than to bestow on me that which I have not." 

Indeed, the "geometric sense" of touch, as Buffon 
terms it, as far as it reaches, is more faithful, and con- 
veys oftentimes a more satisfactory idea of external 
forms, than the eye itself. The great defect is that its 
range is necessarily so limited. It is told of Saunder- 

6 



62 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

son that on one occasion he detected by his finger 
a counterfeit coin which had deceived the eye of a 
connoisseur. We are hardly aware how much of our 
dexterity in the use of the eye arises from incessant 
practice. Those who have been relieved from blind- 
ness at an advanced, or even early, period of life, have 
been found frequently to recur to the old and more 
familiar sense of touch, in preference to the sight. 
The celebrated English anatomist Cheselden mentions 
several illustrations of this fact in an account given by 
him of a blind boy whom he had successfully couched 
for cataracts at the age of fourteen. It was long be- 
fore the youth could discriminate by his eye between 
his old companions the family cat and dog, dissimilar 
as such animals appear to us in color and conforma- 
tion. Being ashamed to ask the oft-repeated question, 
he was observed one day to pass his hand carefully 
over the cat, and then, looking at her steadfastly, to 
exclaim, "So, puss, I shall know you another time." 
It is more natural that he should have been deceived 
by the illusory art of painting, and it was long before 
he could comprehend that the objects depicted did not 
possess the same relief on the canvas as in nature. He 
inquired, "Which is the lying sense here, the sight or 
the touch?" 

The faculty of hearing would seem susceptible of a 
similar refinement with that of seeing. To prove this 
without going into farther detail, it is only necessary to 
observe that much the larger proportion of blind per- 
sons are, more or less, proficients in music, and that 
in some of the institutions for their education, as that 
in Paris, for instance, all the pupils are instructed in 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 63 

this delightful art. The gift of a natural ear for mel- 
ody, therefore, deemed comparatively rare with the 
clairvoyans, would seem to exist so far in every indi- 
vidual as to be capable, by a suitable cultivation, of 
affording a high degree of relish, at least to himself. 

As, in order to a successful education of the blind, 
it becomes necessary to understand what are the facul- 
ties, intellectual -and corporeal, to the development 
and exercise of which their peculiar condition is best 
adapted, so it is equally necessary to understand how 
far, and in what manner, their moral constitution is 
likely to be affected by the insulated position in which 
they are placed. The blind man, shut up within the 
precincts of his own microcosm, is subjected to influ- 
ences of a very different complexion from the bulk of 
mankind, inasmuch as each of the senses is best fitted 
to the introduction of a certain class of ideas into the 
mind, and he is deprived of that one through which 
the rest of his species receive by far the greatest num- 
ber of theirs. Thus it will be readily understood that 
his notions of modesty and delicacy may a good deal 
differ from those of the world at large. The blind 
man of Puisseaux confessed that he could not compre- 
hend why it should be reckoned improper to expose 
one part of the person rather than another. Indeed, 
the conventional rules, so necessarily adopted in so- 
ciety in this relation, might seem in a great degree 
superfluous in a blind community. 

The blind man would seem, also, to be less likely to 
be endowed with the degree of sensibility usual with 
those who enjoy the blessing of sight. It is difficult 
to say how much of our early education depends on 



64 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

the looks, the frowns, the smiles, the tears, the ex- 
ample, in fact, of those placed over and around us. 
From all this the blind child is necessarily excluded. 
These, however, are the great sources of sympathy. 
We feel little for the joys or the sorrows which we 
do not witness. "Out of sight, out of mind," says 
the old proverb. Hence people are so ready to turn 
away from distress which they cannot, or their avarice 
will not suffer them to relieve. Hence, too, persons 
whose compassionate hearts would bleed at the inflic- 
tion of an act of cruelty on so large an animal as a 
horse or a dog, for example, will crush without con- 
cern a wilderness of insects, whose delicate organiza- 
tion and whose bodily agonies are imperceptible to the 
naked eye. The slightest injury occurring in our own 
presence affects us infinitely more than the tidings of 
the most murderous battle, or the sack of the most 
populous and flourishing city at the extremity of the 
globe. Yet such, without much exaggeration, is the 
relative position of the blind, removed by their in- 
firmity at a distance from the world, from the daily ex- 
hibition of those mingled scenes of grief and gladness 
which have their most important uses, perhaps, in 
calling forth our sympathies for our fellow-creatures. 

It has been affirmed that the situation of the blind is 
unpropitious to religious sentiment. They are neces- 
sarily insensible to the grandeur of the spectacle which 
forces itself upon our senses every day of our existence. 
The magnificent map of the heavens, with 

" Every star 
Which the clear concave of a winter's night 
Pours on the eye," 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 65 

is not unrolled for them. The revolutions of the sea- 
sons, with all their beautiful varieties of form and color, 
and whatever glories of the creation lift the soul in 
wonder and gratitude to the Creator, are not for them. 
Their world is circumscribed by the little circle which 
they can span with their own arms. All beyond has 
for them no real existence. This seems to have passed 
within the mind of the mathematician Saunderson, 
whose notions of a Deity would seem to have been, 
to the last, exceedingly vague and unsettled. The 
clergyman who visited him in his latter hours endeav- 
ored to impress upon him the evidence of a God as 
afforded by the astonishing mechanism of the universe. 
"Alas!" said the dying philosopher, "I have been 
condemned to pass my life in darkness, and you speak 
to me of prodigies which I cannot comprehend, and 
which can only be felt by you and those who see like 
you." When reminded of the faith of Newton, Leib- 
nitz, and Clarke, minds from whom he had drunk so 
deeply of instruction, and for whom he entertained the 
profoundest veneration, he remarked, "The testimony 
of Newton is not so strong for me as that of Nature 
was for him : Newton believed on the word of God 
himself, while I am reduced to believe on that of 
Newton." He expired with this ejaculation on his 
lips : " God of Newton, have mercy on me !" 

These, however, may be considered as the peevish 
ebullitions of a naturally skeptical and somewhat 
disappointed spirit, impatient of an infirmity which 
obstructed, as he conceived, his advancement in the 
career of science to which he had so zealously devoted 
himself. It was in allusion to this, undoubtedly, that 

6* 



66 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

he depicted his life as having been "one long desire 
and continued privation." 

It is far more reasonable to believe that there are 
certain peculiarities in the condition of the blind 
which more than counterbalance the unpropitious cir- 
cumstances above described, and which have a decided 
tendency to awaken devotional sentiment in their 
minds. They are the subjects of a grievous calamity, 
which, as in all such cases, naturally disposes the heart 
to sober reflection, and, when permanent and irremedi- 
able, to passive resignation. Their situation necessarily 
excludes most of those temptations which so sorely beset 
us in the world, — those tumultuous passions which, in 
the general rivalry, divide man from man and embitter 
the sweet cup of social life, — those sordid appetites 
which degrade us to the level of the brutes. They 
are subjected, on the contrary, to the most healthful 
influences. Their occupations are of a tranquil, and 
oftentimes of a purely intellectual, character. Their 
pleasures are derived from the endearments of domestic 
intercourse, and the attentions almost always conceded 
to persons in their dependent condition must neces- 
sarily beget a reciprocal kindliness of feeling in their 
own bosoms. In short, the uniform tenor of their 
lives is such as naturally to dispose them to resignation, 
serenity, and cheerfulness ; and accordingly, as far as 
our own experience goes, these have usually been the 
characteristics of the blind. 

Indeed, the cheerfulness almost universally incident 
to persons deprived of sight leads us to consider blind- 
ness as, on the whole, a less calamity than deafness. 
The deaf man is continually exposed to the sight of 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 67 

pleasures and to society in which he can take no part. 
He is the guest at a banquet of which he is not per- 
mitted to partake, the spectator at a theatre where he 
cannot comprehend a syllable. If the blind man is 
excluded from sources of enjoyment equally important, 
he has at least the advantage of not perceiving, and 
not even comprehending, what he has lost. It may be 
added that perhaps the greatest privation consequent 
on blindness is the inability to read, as that on deafness 
is the loss of the pleasures of society. Now, the eyes 
of another may be made in a great degree to supply 
this defect of the blind man, while no art can afford a 
corresponding substitute to the deaf for the privations 
to which he is doomed in social intercourse. He can- 
not hear with the ears of another. As, however, it is 
undeniable that blindness makes one more dependent 
than deafness, we may be content with the conclusion 
that the former would be the most eligible for the 
rich, and the latter for the poor. Our remarks will be 
understood as applying to those only who are wholly 
destitute of the faculties of sight and hearing. A 
person afflicted only with a partial derangement or 
infirmity of vision is placed in the same tantalizing 
predicament above described of the deaf, and is, con- 
sequently, found to be usually of a far more impatient 
and irritable temperament, and, consequently, less 
happy, than the totally blind. With all this, we doubt 
whether there be one of our readers, even should he 
assent to the general truth of our remarks, who would 
not infinitely prefer to incur partial to total blindness, 
and deafness to either. Such is the prejudice in favor 
of eyes ! 



68 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

Patience, perseverance, habits of industry, and, above 
all, a craving appetite for knowledge, are sufficiently 
common to be considered as characteristics of the blind, 
and have tended greatly to facilitate their education, 
which must otherwise prove somewhat tedious, and, 
indeed, doubtful as to its results, considering the formi- 
dable character of the obstacles to be encountered. A 
curious instance of perseverance in overcoming such 
obstacles occurred at Paris, when the institutions for 
the deaf and dumb and for the blind were assembled 
under the same roof in the convent of the Celestines. 
The pupils of the two seminaries, notwithstanding the 
apparently insurmountable barrier interposed between 
them by their respective infirmities, contrived to open 
a communication with each other, which they carried 
on with the greatest vivacity. 

It was probably the consideration of those moral 
qualities, as well as of the capacity for improvement 
which we have described as belonging to the blind, 
which induced the benevolent Haiiy, in conjunction 
with the Philanthropic Society of Paris, to open there, 
in 1784, the first regular seminary for their education 
ever attempted. This institution underwent several 
modifications, not for the better, during the revolu- 
tionary period which followed; until, in 1816, it was 
placed on the respectable basis on which it now exists, 
under the direction of Dr. Guillie, whose untiring 
exertions have been blessed with the most beneficial 
results. 

We shall give a brief view of the course of education 
pursued under his direction, as exhibited by him in the 
valuable treatise to which we have already referred, 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 69 

occasionally glancing at the method adopted in the 
corresponding institution at Edinburgh. 

The fundamental object proposed in every scheme 
of education for the blind is, to direct the attention of 
the pupil to those studies and mechanic arts which he 
will be able afterwards to pursue by means of his own 
exertions and resources, without any external aid. The 
sense of touch is the one, therefore, almost exclusively 
relied on. The fingers are the eyes of the blind. They 
are taught to read in Paris by feeling the surface of 
metallic types, and in Edinburgh by means of letters 
raised on a blank leaf of paper. If they are previously 
acquainted with spelling, which may be easily taught 
them before entering the institution, they learn to 
discriminate the several letters with great facility. 
Their perceptions become so fine by practice that they 
can discern even the finest print, and, when the fingers 
fail them, readily distinguish it by applying the tongue. 
A similar method is employed for instructing them in 
figures; the notation-table invented by Saunderson, 
and once used in the Paris seminary, having been 
abandoned as less simple and obvious, although his 
symbols for the representation of geometrical diagrams 
are still retained. 

As it would be labor lost to learn the art of reading 
without having books to read, various attempts have 
been made to supply this desideratum. The first hint 
of the form now adopted for the impression of these 
books was suggested by the appearance exhibited on 
the reverse side of a copy as removed fresh from the 
printing-press. In imitation of this, a leaf of paper 
of a firm texture is forcibly impressed with types un- 



7 o 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



stained by ink, and larger than the ordinary size, until 
a sufficiently bold relief has been obtained to enable 
the blind person to distinguish the characters by the 
touch. The French have adopted the Italian hand, or 
one very like it, for the fashion of the letters, while the 
Scotch have invented one more angular and rectilinear, 
which, besides the advantage of greater compactness, is 
found better suited to accurate discrimination by the 
touch than smooth and extended curves and circles. 

Several important works have been already printed 
on this plan, viz., a portion of the Scriptures, cate- 
chisms, and offices fcr daily prayer ; grammars in the 
Greek, Latin, French, English, Italian, and Spanish 
languages ; a Latin sclccta, a geography, a course of 
general history, a selection from English poets and 
prose-writers, a course of literature, with a compilation 
of the choicest specimens of French eloquence. With 
all this, the art of printing for the blind is still in its 
infancy. The characters are so unwieldy, and the 
leaves (which cannot be printed on the reverse side, 
as this would flatten the letters upon the other) are 
necessarily so numerous, as to make the volume ex- 
ceedingly bulky, and of course expensive. The Gospel 
of St. John, for example, expands into three large oc- 
tavo volumes. Some farther improvement must occur, 
therefore, before the invention can become extensively 
useful. There can be no reason to doubt of such a 
result eventually, for it is only by long and repeated 
experiment that the art of printing in the usual way, 
and every other art, indeed, has been brought to 
its present perfection. Perhaps some mode may be 
adopted like that of stenography, which, although en- 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



71 



cumbering the learner with some additional difficulties 
at first, may abundantly compensate him in the con- 
densed forms and consequently cheaper and more nu- 
merous publications which could be afforded by it. 
Perhaps ink or some other material of greater con- 
sistency than that ordinarily used in printing may be 
devised, which, when communicated by the type to 
the paper, will leave a character sufficiently raised to 
be distinguished by the touch. We have known a 
blind person able to decipher the characters in a piece 
of music to which the ink had been imparted more 
liberally than usual. In the mean time, what has been 
already done has conferred a service on the blind 
which we, who become insensible from the very prodi- 
gality of our blessings, cannot rightly estimate. The 
glimmering of the taper, which is lost in the blaze of 
day, is sufficient to guide the steps of the wanderer in 
darkness. The unsealed volume of Scripture will fur- 
nish him with the best sources of consolation under 
every privation ; the various grammars are so many 
keys with which to unlock the stores of knowledge to 
enrich his after-life ; and the selections from the most 
beautiful portions of elegant literature will afford him 
a permanent source of recreation and delight. 

One method used for instruction in writing is, to 
direct the pencil, or stylus, in a groove cut in the 
fashion of the different letters. Other modes, how- 
ever, too complex for description here, are resorted 
to, by which the blind person is enabled not only to 
write, but to read what he has thus traced. A portable 
writing-case for this purpose has also been invented by 
one of the blind, who, it is observed, are the most in- 



72 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

genious in supplying, as they are best acquainted with, 
their own wants. A very simple method of epistolary 
correspondence, by means of a string-alphabet, as it is 
called, consisting of a cord or riband in which knots 
of various dimensions represent certain classes of let-. 
ters, has been devised by two blind men at Edinburgh. 
This contrivance, which is so simple that it can be 
acquired in an hour's time by the most ordinary ca- 
pacity, is asserted to have the power of conveying 
ideas with equal precision with the pen. A blind lady 
of our acquaintance, however, whose fine understand- 
ing and temper have enabled her to surmount many 
of the difficulties of her situation, after a trial of this 
invention, gives the preference to the mode usually 
adopted by her of pricking the letters on the paper 
with a pin, — an operation which she performs with 
astonishing rapidity, and which, in addition to the 
advantage possessed by the string-alphabet of being 
legible by the touch, answers more completely the 
purposes of epistolary correspondence, since it may be 
readily interpreted by any one on being held up to the 
light. 

The scheme of instruction at the institution for the 
blind in Paris comprehends geography, history, the 
Greek and Latin, together with the French, Italian, 
and English languages, arithmetic and the higher 
branches of mathematics, music, and some of the most 
useful mechanic arts. For mathematics the pupils 
appear to discover a natural aptitude, many of them 
attaining such proficiency as not only to profit by the 
public lectures of the most eminent professors in the 
sciences, but to carry away the highest prizes in the 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



73 



lyceums in a competition with those who possess the 
advantages of sight. In music, as we have before 
remarked, they all make greater or less proficiency. 
They are especially instructed in the organ, which, 
from its frequency in the churches, affords one of the 
most obvious means of obtaining a livelihood. 

The method of tuition adopted is that of mutual 
instruction. The blind are ascertained to learn most 
easily and expeditiously from those in the same con- 
dition with themselves. Two male teachers, with one 
female, are in this way found adequate to the super- 
intendence of eighty scholars, which, considering the 
obstacles to be encountered, must be admitted to be 
a small apparatus for the production of such extensive 
results. 

In teaching them the mechanic arts, two principles 
appear to be kept in view, namely, to select such for 
each individual respectively as may be best adapted to 
his future residence and destination ; the trades, for 
example, most suitable for a sea-port being those least 
so for the country, and vice versa. Secondly, to con- 
fine their attention to such occupations as from their 
nature are most accessible to, and which can be most 
perfectly attained by, persons in their situation. It is 
absurd to multiply obstacles from the mere vanity of 
conquering them. 

Printing is an art for which the blind show partic- 
ular talent, going through all the processes of com- 
posing, serving the press, and distributing the types 
with the same accuracy with those who can see. In- 
deed, much of this mechanical occupation with the 
clairvoyans (we are in want of some such compendious 
d 7 



74 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

phrase in our language) appears to be the result rather 
of habit than any exercise of the eye. The blind 
print all the books for their own use. They are taught 
also to spin, to knit, in which last operation they 
are extremely ready, knitting very finely, with open 
work, etc., and are much employed by the Parisian 
hosiers in the manufacture of elastic vests, shirts, and 
petticoats. They make purses, delicately embroidered 
with figures of animals and flowers, whose various 
tints are selected with perfect propriety. The fingers 
of the females are observed to be particularly adapted 
to this nicer sort of work, from their superior delicacy, 
ordinarily, to those of men. They are employed also 
in manufacturing girths, in netting in all its branches, 
in making shoes of list, plush, cloth, colored skin, and 
list carpets, of which a vast number is annually dis- 
posed of. Weaving is particularly adapted to the 
blind, who perform all the requisite manipulation 
without any other assistance but that of setting up 
the warp. They manufacture whips, straw bottoms 
for chairs, coarse straw hats, rope, cord, pack-thread, 
baskets, straw, rush, and plush mats, which are very 
salable in France. 

The articles manufactured in the Asvlum for the 
Blind in Scotland are somewhat different ; and, as 
they show for what an extensive variety of occupations 
they may be qualified in despite of their infirmity, we 
will take the liberty, at the hazard of being somewhat 
tedious, of quoting the catalogue of them exhibited in 
one of their advertisements. The articles offered for 
sale consist of cotton and linen cloths, ticked and 
striped Hollands, towelling and diapers, worsted net 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



75 



for fruit-trees ; hair cloth, hair mats, and hair ropes ; 
basket-work of every description ; hair, India hemp, 
and straw door-mats ; saddle-girths ; rope and twines 
of all kinds ; netting for sheep-pens ; garden and 
onion twine nets ; fishing-nets, beehives, mattresses, 
and cushions ; feather beds, bolsters, and pillows ; 
mattresses and beds of every description cleaned and 
repaired. The labors in this department are per- 
formed by the boys. The girls are employed in 
sewing, knitting stockings, spinning, making fine 
banker's twine, and various works besides, usually 
executed by well-educated females. 

Such is the emulation of the blind, according to 
Dr. Guillie, in the institution of Paris, that hitherto 
there has been no necessity of stimulating their ex- 
ertions by the usual motives of reward or punishment. 
Delighted with their sensible progress in vanquishing 
the difficulties incident to their condition, they are 
content if they can but place themselves on a level 
with the more fortunate of their fellow -creatures. And 
it is observed that many, who in the solitude of their 
own homes have failed in their attempts to learn some 
of the arts taught in this institution, have acquired a 
knowledge of them with great alacrity when cheered 
by the sympathy of individuals involved in the same 
calamity with themselves, and with whom, of course, 
they could compete with equal probability of success. 

The example of Paris has been followed in the prin- 
cipal cities in most of the other countries of Europe: 
in England, Scotland, Russia, Prussia, Austria, Swit- 
zerland, Holland, and Denmark. These establish- 
ments, which are conducted on the same general prin- 



7 6 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

ciples, have adopted a plan of education more or less 
comprehensive, some of them, like those of Paris and 
Edinburgh, involving the higher branches of intel- 
lectual education, and others, as in London and Liv- 
erpool, confining themselves chiefly to practical arts. 
The results, however, have been in the highest degree 
cheering to the philanthropist in the light thus poured 
in upon minds to which all the usual avenues were 
sealed up, — in the opportunity afforded them of de- 
veloping those latent powers which had been hitherto 
wasted in inaction, and in the happiness thus imparted 
to an unfortunate class of beings, who now for the first 
time were permitted to assume their proper station in 
society, and, instead of encumbering, to contribute by 
their own exertions to the general prosperity. 

We rejoice that the inhabitants of our own city have 
been the first to give an example of such beneficent 
institutions in the New World. And it is principally 
with the view of directing the attention of the public 
towards it that we have gone into a review of what has 
been effected in this way in Europe. The credit of 
having first suggested the undertaking here is due to 
our townsman, Dr. John D. Fisher, through whose 
exertions, aided by those of several other benevolent 
individuals, the subject was brought before the Legis- 
lature of this State, and an act of incorporation was 
granted to the petitioners, bearing date March 2d, 
1829, authorizing them, under the title of the "New 
England Asylum for the Blind," to hold property, 
receive donations and bequests, and to exercise the 
other functions usually appertaining to similar corpo- 
rations. 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



77 



A resolution was subsequently passed, during the 
same session, requiring the selectmen of the several 
towns throughout the commonwealth to make returns 
of the number of blind inhabitants, with their ages, 
periods of blindness, personal condition, etc. By far 
the larger proportion of these functionaries, however, 
with a degree of apathy which does them very little 
credit, paid no attention whatever to this requisition. 
By the aid of such as did comply with it, and by means 
of circulars addressed to the clergymen of the various 
parishes, advices have been received from one hundred 
and forty-one towns, comprising somewhat less than 
half of the whole number within the State. From 
this imperfect estimate it would appear that the num- 
ber of blind persons in these towns amounts to two 
hundred and forty-three, of whom more than one-fifth 
are under thirty years of age, which period is assigned 
as the limit within which they cannot fail of receiv- 
ing all the benefit to be derived from the system of 
instruction pursued in the institutions for the blind. 

The proportion of the blind to our whole population, 
as founded on the above estimate, is somewhat higher 
than that established by Zeune for the corresponding 
latitudes in Europe, where blindness decreases in ad- 
vancing from the equator to the poles, it being com- 
puted in Egypt at the rate of one to one hundred, and 
in Norway of one to one thousand, which last is 
conformable to ours. 

Assuming the preceding estimate as the basis, it will 
appear that there are about five hundred blind persons 
in the State of Massachusetts at the present moment ; 
and, adopting the census of 1820, there could not at 

7* 



7 8 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

that time, according to the same rate, be less than six- 
teen hundred and fifty in all New England, one-fifth 
being under thirty years of age ; a number which, as 
the blind are usually retired from public observation, 
far exceeds what might be conceived on a cursory 
inspection. 

From the returns it would appear that a large pro- 
portion of the blind in Massachusetts are in humble 
circumstances, and a still larger proportion of those in 
years indigent or paupers. This is imputable to their 
having learned no trade or profession in their youth, 
so that, when deprived of their natural guardians, they 
have necessarily become a charge upon the public. 

Since the year 1825 an appropriation has been con- 
tinued by the Legislature for the purpose of maintaining 
a certain number of pupils at the Asylum for the Deaf 
and Dumb at Hartford. A resolution was obtained 
during the last session of the General Court authorizing 
the governor to pay over to the Asylum for the Blind 
whatever balance of the sum thus appropriated might 
remain in the treasury unexpended at the end of the 
current year, and the same with every subsequent year 
to which the grant extended, unless otherwise advised. 
Seven hundred dollars only have been received as the 
balance of the past year, a sum obviously inadequate to 
the production of any important result, and far inferior 
to what had been anticipated by the friends of the 
measure. On the whole, we are inclined to doubt 
whether this will be found the most suitable mode of 
creating resources for the asylum. Although, in fact, 
it disposes only of the superfluity, it has the appearance 
of subtracting from the positive revenues of the Deaf 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



79 



and Dumb, an institution of equal merit and claims 
with any other whatever. The Asylum for the Blind 
is an establishment of too much importance to be left 
thus dependent on a precarious contingent, and is 
worthy, were it only in an economical point of view, 
of being placed by the State on some more secure and 
ample basis. 

As it is, the want of funds opposes a sensible ob- 
struction to its progress. The pressure of the times 
has made the present moment exceedingly unfavorable 
to personal solicitation, although so much has been 
effected in this way, through the liberality of a few 
individuals, that, as we understand, preparations are 
now making for procuring the requisite instructors and 
apparatus on a moderate and somewhat reduced scale. 

As to the comprehensiveness of the scheme of edu- 
cation to be pursued at the asylum, whether it shall 
embrace intellectual culture or be confined simply to 
the mechanic arts, this must, of course, be ultimately 
determined by the extent of its resources. We trust, 
however, it will be enabled to adopt the former 
arrangement, at least so far as to afford the pupils an 
acquaintance with the elements of the more popular 
sciences. There is such a diffusion of liberal knowl- 
edge among all classes in this country, that if the blind 
are suffered to go without any tincture of it from the 
institution, they will always, whatever be the skill 
acquired by them in mechanical occupations, continue 
to feel a sense of their own mental inferiority. The 
connection of these higher with the more direct objects 
of the institution will serve, moreover, to give it greater 
dignity and importance. And while it will open sources 



80 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

of knowledge from which many may be in a situation 
to derive permanent consolation, it will instruct the 
humblest individual in what may be of essential utility 
to him, as writing and arithmetic, for example, in his 
intercourse with the world. 

To what extent it is desirable that the asylum be 
placed on a charitable foundation is another subject of 
consideration. This, we believe, is the character of 
most of the establishments in Europe. That in Scot- 
land, for instance, contains about a hundred subjects, 
who, with their families included, amount to two hun- 
dred and fifty souls, all supported from the labors of 
the blind, conjointly with the funds of the institution. 
This is undoubtedly one of the noblest and most dis- 
criminating charities in the world. It seems probable, 
however, that this is not the plan best adapted to our 
exigencies. We want not to maintain the blind, but 
to put them in the way of contributing to their own 
maintenance. By placing the expenses of tuition and 
board as low as possible, the means of effecting this 
will be brought within the reach of a large class of 
them ; and for the rest, it will be obvious economy in 
the State to provide them with the means of acquiring 
an education at once that may enable them to con- 
tribute permanently towards their own support, which, 
in some shape or other, is now chargeable on the public. 
Perhaps, however, some scheme may be devised for 
combining both these objects, if this be deemed prefer- 
able to the adoption of either exclusively. 

We are convinced that, as far as the institution is to 
rely for its success on public patronage, it will not be 
disappointed. If once successfully in operation and 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 81 

brought before the public eye, it cannot fail of exciting 
a very general sympathy, which, in this country, has 
never been refused to the calls of humanity. No one, 
we think, who has visited the similar endowments in 
Paris or in Edinburgh will easily forget the sensations 
which he experienced on witnessing so large a class of 
his unfortunate fellow-creatures thus restored from in- 
tellectual darkness to the blessings, if we may so speak, 
of light and liberty. There is no higher evidence of 
the worth of the human mind than its capacity of 
drawing consolation from its own resources under so 
heavy a privation ; so that it not only can exhibit 
resignation and cheerfulness, but energy to burst the 
fetters with which it is encumbered. Who could 
refuse his sympathy to the success of these efforts, or 
withhold from the subject of them the means of attain- 
ing his natural level and usefulness in society, from 
which circumstances less favorable to him than to our- 
selves have hitherto excluded him ? 



D* 



82 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



IRVING'S CONQUEST OF GRANADA.* 

(October, 1829.) 

Almost as many qualifications may be demanded 
for a perfect historian, indeed the Abbe Mably has 
enumerated as many, as Cicero stipulates for a perfect 
orator. He must be strictly impartial ; a lover of truth 
under all circumstances, and ready to declare it at all 
hazards : he must be deeply conversant with whatever 
may bring into relief the character of the people he is 
depicting, not merely with their laws, constitution, 
general resources, and all the other more visible parts 
of the machinery of government, but with the nicer 
moral and social relations, the informing spirit which 
gives life to the whole, but escapes the eye of a vulgar 
observer. If he has to do with other ages and nations, 
he must transport himself into them, expatriating him- 
self, as it were, from his own, in order to get the very 
form and pressure of the times he is delineating. He 
must be conscientious in his attention to geography, 
chronology, etc., an inaccuracy in which has been 
fatal to more than one good philosophical history ; 
and, mixed up with all these drier details, he must 
display the various powers of a novelist or dramatist, 

* "A Chronicle of the Conquest of Granada. By Fray Antonio 
Agapida." 1829 : 2 vols. i2mo. Philadelphia : Carey, Lea & Carey. 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. S3 

throwing his characters into suitable lights and shades, 
disposing his scenes so as to awaken and maintain an 
unflagging interest, and diffusing over the whole that 
finished style without which his work will only become 
a magazine of materials for the more elegant edifices 
of subsequent writers. He must be — in short, there is 
no end to what a perfect historian must be and do. It 
is hardly necessary to add that such a monster never 
did and never will exist. 

But, although we cannot attain to perfect excellence 
in this or any other science in this world, considerable 
approaches have been made to it, and different indi- 
viduals have arisen at different periods, possessed in 
an eminent degree of some of the principal qualities 
which go to make up the aggregate of the character we 
have been describing. The peculiar character of these 
qualities will generally be determined in the writer by 
that of the age in which he lives. Thus, the earlier 
historians of Greece and Rome sought less to instruct 
than to amuse. They filled their pictures with dazzling 
and seductive images. In their researches into an- 
tiquity, they were not startled by the marvellous, like 
the more prudish critics of our day, but welcomed it 
as likely to stir the imaginations of their readers. 
They seldom interrupted the story by impertinent re- 
flection. They bestowed infinite pains on the costume, 
the style of their history, and, in fine, made every 
thing subordinate to the main purpose of conveying 
an elegant and interesting narrative. Such was He- 
rodotus, such Livy, and such, too, the earlier chroni- 
clers of modern Europe, whose pages glow with the 
picturesque and brilliant pageants of an age of chiv- 



84 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

airy. These last, as well as Herodotus, may be said 
to have written in the infancy of their nations, when 
the imagination is more willingly addressed than the 
understanding. Livy, who wrote in a riper age, lived, 
nevertheless, in a court and a period where tranquil- 
lity and opulence disposed the minds of men to ele- 
gant recreation rather than to severe discipline and 
exertion. 

As, however, the nation advanced in years, or be- 
came oppressed with calamity, history also assumed a 
graver complexion. Fancy gave way to reflection. 
The mind, no longer invited to rove abroad in quest 
of elegant and alluring pictures, was driven back upon 
itself, speculated more deeply, and sought for support 
under the external evils of life in moral and philo- 
sophical truth. Description was abandoned for the 
study of character; men took the place of events; and 
the romance was converted into the drama. Thus it 
was with Tacitus, who lived under those imperial 
monsters who turned Rome into a charnel-house, and 
his compact narratives are filled with moral and polit- 
ical axioms sufficiently numerous to make a volume ; 
and, indeed, Brotier has made one of them in his 
edition of the historian. The same philosophical spirit 
animates the page of Thucydides, himself one of the 
principal actors in the long, disastrous struggle that 
terminated in the ruin of his nation. 

But, notwithstanding the deeper and more compre- 
hensive thought of these later writers, there was still a 
wide difference between the complexion given to his- 
tory under their hands and that which it lias assumed 
in our time. We would not be understood as deter- 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 85 

mining, but simply as discriminating, their relative 
merits. The Greeks and Romans -lived when the 
world, at least when the mind, was in its comparative 
infancy, — when fancy and feeling were most easily 
and loved most to be excited. They possessed a finer 
sense of beauty than the moderns. They were in- 
finitely more solicitous about the external dress, the 
finish, and all that makes up the poetry of a composi- 
tion. Poetry, indeed, mingled in their daily pursuits 
as well as pleasures ; it determined their gravest delib- 
erations. The command of their armies was given, 
not to the best general, but ofttimes to the most elo- 
quent orator. Poetry entered into their religion, and 
created those beautiful monuments of architecture and 
sculpture which the breath of time has not tarnished. 
It entered into their philosophy; and no one confessed 
its influence more deeply than he who would have 
banished it from his republic. It informed the souls 
of their orators, and prompted those magnificent rhap- 
sodies which fall lifeless enough from the stammering 
tongue of the school-boy, but which once awaked to 
ecstasy the living populace of Athens. It entered 
deeply even into their latest history. It was first ex- 
hibited in the national chronicles of Homer. It lost 
little of its coloring, though it conformed to the gen- 
eral laws of prosaic composition, under Herodotus. 
And it shed a pleasing grace over the sober pages of 
Thucydides and Xenophon. The muse, indeed, was 
stripped of her wings ; she no longer made her airy 
excursions into the fairy regions of romance ; but, as 
she moved along the earth, the sweetest wild flowers 
seemed to spring up unbidden at her feet. We would 

8 



86 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

not be understood as implying that Grecian history 
was ambitious of florid or meretricious ornament. 
Nothing could be more simple than its general plan 
and execution ; far too simple, we fear, for imitation 
in our day. Thus Thucydides, for example, distributes 
his events most inartiflcially, according to the regular 
revolutions of the seasons ; and the rear of every sec- 
tion is brought up with the same eternal repetition of 
EToq rw -uAitj.w izi/.sura rwde, ov Oouy.udcdr^ guviypcufts. 
But in the fictitious speeches with which he has illu- 
mined his narrative he has left the choicest specimens 
of Attic eloquence ; and he elaborated his general dic- 
tion into so high a finish that Demosthenes, as is well 
known, in the hope of catching some of his rhetorical 
graces, thought him worthy of being thrice transcribed 
with his own hand. 

Far different has been the general conception, as 
well as execution, of history by the moderns. In this, 
however, it was accommodated to the exigencies of 
their situation, and, as with the ancients, still reflected 
the spirit of the age. If the Greeks lived in the infancy 
of civilization, the contemporaries of our day may be 
said to have reached its prime. The same revolution 
has taken place as in the growth of an individual. 
The vivacity of the imagination has been blunted, but 
reason is matured. The credulity of youth has given 
way to habits of cautious inquiry, and sometimes to a 
phlegmatic skepticism. The productions, indeed, which 
first appeared in the doubtful twilight of morning ex- 
hibited the love of the marvellous, the light and fanciful 
spirit of a green and tender age. But a new order of 
things commenced as the stores of classical learning 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 87 

were unrolled to the eye of the scholar. The mind 
seemed at once to enter upon the rich inheritance 
which the sages of antiquity had been ages in accu- 
mulating, and to start, as it were, from the very point 
where they had terminated their career. Thus raised 
by learning and experience, it was enabled to take a 
wider view of its proper destiny, — to understand that 
truth is the greatest good, and to discern the surest 
method of arriving at it. The Christian doctrine, too, 
inculcated that the end of being was best answered by 
a life of active usefulness, and not by one of abstract 
contemplation, or selfish indulgence, or passive forti- 
tude, as variously taught by the various sects of an- 
tiquity. Hence a new standard of moral excellence 
was formed. Pursuits were estimated by their practical 
results, and the useful was preferred to the ornamental. 
Poetry, confined to her own sphere, was no longer 
permitted to mingle in the councils of philosophy. 
Intellectual and physical science, instead of floating on 
vague speculation, as with the ancients, was established 
on careful induction and experiment. The orator, in- 
stead of adorning himself with the pomp and garniture 
of verse, sought only to acquire greater dexterity in 
the management of the true weapons of debate. The 
passions were less frequently assailed, the reason more. 
A wider field was open to the historian. He was 
no longer to concoct his narrative, if the scene lay 
in a remote period, from the superficial rumors of oral 
tradition. Libraries were to be ransacked ; medals and 
monuments to be studied ; obsolete manuscripts to be 
deciphered. Every assertion was to be fortified by an 
authority ; and the opinions of others, instead of being 



88 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

admitted on easy faith, were to be carefully collated, 
and the balance of probability struck between them. 
With these qualifications of antiquarian and critic, the 
modern historian was to combine that of the philoso- 
pher, deducing from his mass of facts general theorems, 
and giving to them their most extended application. 

By all this process, poetry lost much, but philosophy 
gained more. The elegant arts sensibly declined, but 
the most important and recondite secrets of nature 
were laid open. All those sciences which have for 
their object the happiness and improvement of the 
species, the science of government, of political econ- 
omy, of education — natural and experimental science 
— were carried far beyond the boundaries which they 
could possibly have reached under the ancient systems. 

The peculiar forms of historic writing, as it exists 
with the moderns, were not fully developed until the 
last century. It may be well to notice the intermediate 
shape which it assumed before it reached this period in 
Spain and Italy, but especially this latter country, in 
the sixteenth century. The Italian historians of that 
age seem to have combined the generalizing and re- 
flecting spirit characteristic of the moderns, with the 
simple and graceful forms of composition which have 
descended to us from the ancients. Machiavelli, in 
particular, may remind us of some recent statue which 
exhibits all the lineaments and proportions of a con- 
temporary, but to which the sculptor has given a sort 
of antique dignity by enveloping it in the folds of the 
Roman toga. No one of the Spanish historians is to 
be named with him. Mariana, who enjoys among 
them the greatest celebrity, has, it is true, given to 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 89 

his style, both in the Latin and Castilian, the elegant 
transparency of an ancient classic; but the mass of 
detail is not quickened by a single spark of philosophy 
or original reflection. Mariana was a monk, one of a 
community who have formed the most copious but in 
many respects the most incompetent chroniclers in the 
world, cut off as they are from all sympathy with any 
portion of the species save their own order, and pre- 
disposed by education to admit as truth the grossest 
forgeries of fanaticism. What can their narratives be 
worth, distorted thus by prejudice and credulity? The 
Aragonese writers, and Zurita in particular, though far 
inferior as to the literary execution of their works, 
exhibit a pregnant thought and a manly independence 
of expression far superior to the Jesuit Mariana. 

The Italian historians of the sixteenth century, 
moreover, had the good fortune not only to have been 
eye-witnesses but to have played prominent parts in 
the events which they commemorated. And this gives 
a vitality to their touches which is in vain to be ex- 
pected from those of a closet politician. This rare 
union of public and private excellence is delicately in- 
timated in the inscription on Guicciardini's monument, 
ii Cujus negotium, an otium, gloriosius imertum." 

The personage by whom the present laws of historic 
composition may be said to have been first arranged 
into a regular system was Voltaire. This extraordinary 
genius, whose works have been productive of so much 
mingled good and evil, discovers in them many traces 
of a humane and beneficent disposition. Nowhere is 
his invective more keenly directed than against acts of 
cruelty and oppression, — above all, of religious oppres- 

8* 



9 o BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

sion. He lived in an age of crying abuses both in 
Church and government. Unfortunately, he employed 
a weapon against them whose influence is not to be 
controlled by the most expert hand. The envenomed 
shaft of irony not only wounds the member at which 
it is aimed, but diffuses its poison to the healthiest 
and remotest regions of the body. 

The free and volatile temper of Voltaire forms a sin- 
gular contrast with his resolute pertinacity of purpose. 
Bard, philosopher, historian, this literary Proteus ani- 
mated every shape with the same mischievous spirit of 
philosophy. It never deserted him, even in the most 
sportive sallies of his fancy. It seasons his romances 
equally with his gravest pieces in the encyclopedia; 
his familiar letters and most licentious doggerel no less 
than his histories. The leading object of this philos- 
ophy may be defined by the single cant phrase, "the 
abolition of prejudices." But in Voltaire prejudices 
were too often confounded with principles. 

In his histories, he seems ever intent on exhibiting, 
in the most glaring colors, the manifold inconsisten- 
cies of the human race ; in showing the contradiction 
between profession and practice ; in contrasting the 
magnificence of the apparatus with the impotence of 
the results. The enormous abuses of Christianity are 
brought into juxtaposition with the most meritorious 
features in other religions, and thus all are reduced to 
nearly the same level. The credulity of one half of 
mankind is set in opposition to the cunning of the 
other. The most momentous events are traced to the 
most insignificant causes, and the ripest schemes of 
wisdom are shown to have been baffled by the inter- 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



9 1 



vention of the most trivial accidents. Thus, the con- 
duct of the world seems to be regulated by chance ; 
the springs of human action are resolved into selfish- 
ness; and religion, of whatever denomination, is only 
a different form of superstition. It is true that his 
satire is directed not so much against any particular 
system as the vices of that system ; but the result left 
upon the mind is not a whit less pernicious. His 
philosophical romance of " Candide" affords a good 
exemplification of his manner. The thesis of perfect 
optimism in this world, at which he levels this jeu 
d % esprit, is manifestly indefensible. But then he sup- 
ports his position with such an array of gross and hyper- 
bolical atrocities, without the intervention of a single 
palliative circumstance, and, withal, in such a tone of 
keen derision, that if any serious impression be left 
on the mind it can be no other than that of a baleful, 
withering skepticism. The historian rarely so far for- 
gets his philosophy as to kindle into high and generous 
emotion the glow of patriotism, or moral and religious 
enthusiasm. And hence, too, his style, though always 
graceful, and often seasoned with the sallies of a piquant 
wit, never rises into eloquence or sublimity. 

Voltaire has been frequently reproached for want of 
historical accuracy. But, if we make due allowance 
for the sweeping tenor of his reflections and for the 
infinite variety of his topics, we shall be slow in giving 
credit to this charge.* He was, indeed, oftentimes 
misled by his inveterate Pyrrhonism ; a defect, when 

*' Indeed, Hallam and Warton — the one as diligent a laborer in 
the field of civil history as the other has been in literary — both bear 
testimony to his general veracity. 



9 2 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



carried to the excess in which he indulged it, almost 
equally fatal to the historian with credulity or super- 
stition. His researches frequently led him into dark, 
untravelled regions ; but the aliment which he im- 
ported thence served only too often to minister to his 
pernicious philosophy. He resembled the allegorical 
agents of Milton, paving a way across the gulf of 
Chaos for the spirits of mischief to enter more easily 
upon the earth. 

Voltaire effected a no less sensible revolution in the 
structure than in the spirit of history. Thus, instead 
of following the natural consecutive order of events, 
the work was distributed, on the principle of a Catalogue 
raisotme, into sections arranged according to their sub- 
jects, and copious dissertations were introduced into 
the body of the narrative. Thus, in his Essai sur les 
MceurSy etc., one chapter is devoted to letters, another 
to religion, a third to manners, and so on. And in the 
same way, in his "Age of Louis the Fourteenth," he 
has thrown his various illustrations of the policy of 
government, and of the social habits of the court, into 
a detached portion at the close of the book. 

This would seem to be deviating from the natural 
course of things as they occur in the world, where the 
multifarious pursuits of pleasure and business, the lights 
and shadows, as it were, of life, are daily intermingled 
in the motley panorama of human existence. But, 
however artificial this division, it enabled the reader 
to arrive more expeditiously at the results, for which 
alone history is valuable, while at the same time it put 
it in the power of the writer to convey with more 
certainty and facility his own impressions. 



CRITIC A L M ISC EL LANIES. 



93 



This system was subsequently so much refined upon 
that Montesquieu, in his " Grandeur et Decadence des 
Romains," laid no farther stress on historical facts than 
as they furnished him with illustrations of his particular 
theorems. Indeed, so little did his work rest upon the 
veracity of such facts that, although the industry of 
Niebuhr, or, rather, of Beaufort, has knocked away 
almost all the foundations of early Rome, Montes- 
quieu's treatise remains as essentially unimpaired in 
credit as before. Thus the materials which anciently 
formed the body of history now served only as ingre- 
dients from which its spirit was to be extracted. But 
this was not always the spirit of truth. And the 
arbitrary selection as well as disposition of incidents 
which this new method allowed, and the coloring 
which they were to receive from the author, made it 
easy to pervert them to the construction of the wildest 
hypotheses. 

The progress of philosophical history is particularly 
observable in Great Britain, where it seems to have 
been admirably suited to the grave, reflecting temper 
of the people. In the graces of narrative they have 
ever been unequal to their French neighbors. Their 
ancient chronicles are inferior in spirit and execution 
to those either of France or Spain ; and their more 
elaborate histories, down to the middle of the eigh- 
teenth century, could not in any way compete with 
the illustrious models of Italy. But soon after this 
period several writers appeared, exhibiting a combina- 
tion of qualities, erudition, critical penetration, powers 
of generalization, and a political sagacity unrivalled in 
any other age or country. 



94 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



The influence of the new forms of historical com- 
position, however, was here, as elsewhere, made too 
frequently subservient to party and sectarian preju- 
dices. Tory histories and Whig histories, Protestant 
and Catholic histories, successively appeared, and 
seemed to neutralize each other. The most venerable 
traditions were exploded as nursery-tales. The statues 
decreed by antiquity were cast down, and the charac- 
ters of miscreants whom the general suffrage of mankind 
had damned to infamy — of a Dionysius, a Borgia, or a 
Richard the Third — were now retraced by what Jovius 
distinguishes as "the golden pen" of the historian, 
until the reader, bewildered in the maze of uncertainty, 
is almost ready to join in the exclamation of Lord 
Orford to his son, " Oh, quote me not history, for that 
I know to be false!" It is remarkable, indeed, that 
the last-mentioned monarch, Richard the Third, whose 
name has become a byword of atrocity, the burden of 
the ballad and the moral of the drama, should have 
been the subject of elaborate vindication by two 
eminent writers of the most opposite characters, the 
pragmatical Horace Walpore and the circumspect and 
conscientious Sharon Turner. The apology of the 
latter exhibits a technical precision, a severe scrutiny 
into the authenticity of records, and a nice balancing 
of contradictory testimony, that give it all the air of a 
legal investigation. Thus history seems to be con- 
ducted on the principles of a judicial process, in which 
the writer, assuming the functions of an advocate, 
studiously suppresses whatever may make against his 
own side, supports himself by the strongest array of 
evidence which he can muster, discredits as far as 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



95 



possible that of the opposite party, and, by dexterous 
interpretation and ingenious inference, makes out the 
most plausible argument for his client that the case 
will admit. 

But these, after all, are only the abuses of philosoph- 
ical history, and the unseasonable length of remark into 
which we have been unwarily led in respect to them 
may give us the appearance of laying on them greater 
emphasis than they actually deserve. There are few 
writers in any country whose judgment has not been 
sometimes warped by personal prejudices. But it is to 
the credit of the principal British historians that, how- 
ever they may have been occasionally under the influ- 
ence of such human infirmity, they have conducted 
their researches, in the main, with equal integrity 
and impartiality. And while they have enriched their 
writings with the stores of a various erudition, they 
have digested from these details results of the most 
enlarged and practical application. History in their 
hands, although it may have lost much of the sim- 
plicity and graphic vivacity which it maintained with 
the ancients, has gained much more in the amount of 
useful knowledge and the lessons of sound philosophy 
which it inculcates. 

There is no writer who exhibits more distinctly the 
full development of the principles of modern history, 
with all its virtues and defects, than Gibbon. His 
learning was fully equal to his vast subject. This, com- 
mencing with expiring civilization in ancient Rome, 
continues on until the period of its final and perfect 
resurrection in Italy in the fifteenth century, and thus 
may be said to furnish the lights which are to guide us 



9 6 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



through the long interval of darkness which divides the 
Old from the Modern world. The range of his subject 
was fully equal to its duration. Goths, Huns, Tartars, 
and all the rude tribes of the North are brought upon 
the stage, together with the more cultivated natives of 
the South, the Greeks, Italians, and the intellectual 
Arab ; and, as the scene shifts from one country to 
another, we behold its population depicted with that 
peculiarity of physiognomy and studied propriety of 
costume which belong to dramatic exhibition ; for 
Gibbon was a more vivacious draughtsman than most 
writers of his school. He was, moreover, deeply 
versed in geography, chronology, antiquities, verbal 
criticism, — in short, in all the sciences in any way 
subsidiary to his art. The extent of his subject per- 
mitted him to indulge in those elaborate disquisitions 
so congenial to the spirit of modern history on the 
most momentous and interesting topics, while his early 
studies enabled him to embellish the drier details of 
his narrative with the charms of a liberal and elegant 
scholarship. 

What, then, was wanting to this accomplished writer? 
Good faith. His defects were precisely of the class 
of which we have before been speaking, and his most 
elaborate efforts exhibit too often the perversion of 
learning and ingenuity to the vindication of precon- 
ceived hypotheses. He cannot, indeed, be convicted 
of ignorance or literal inaccuracy, as he has triumph- 
antly proved in his discomfiture of the unfortunate 
Davis. But his disingenuous mode of conducting the 
argument leads precisely to the same unfair result. 
Thus, in his celebrated chapters on the "Progress of 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 97 

Christianity," which he tells us were "reduced by 
three successive revisals from a bulky volume to their 
present size, ' ' he has often slurred over in the text such 
particulars as might reflect most credit on the charac- 
ter of the religion, or shuffled them into a note at the 
bottom of the page, while all that admits of a doubtful 
complexion in its early propagation is ostentatiously 
blazoned and set in contrast to the most amiable fea- 
tures of paganism. At the same time, by a style of 
innuendo that conveys "more than meets the ear," he 
has contrived, with Iago-like duplicity, to breathe a 
taint of suspicion on the purity which he dares not 
openly assail. It would be easy to furnish examples 
of all this were this the place for them ; but the charges 
have no novelty, and have been abundantly substan- 
tiated by others. 

It is a consequence of this skepticism in Gibbon, as 
with Voltaire, that his writings are nowhere warmed 
with a generous moral sentiment. The most sublime 
of all spectacles, that of the martyr who suffers for 
conscience' sake, and this equally whether his creed 
be founded in truth or error, is contemplated by the 
historian with the smile, or, rather, sneer, of philo- 
sophic indifference. This is not only bad taste, as he is 
addressing a Christian audience, but he thus voluntarily 
relinquishes one of the most powerful engines for the 
movement of human passion, which is never so easily 
excited as by deeds of suffering, self-devoted heroism. 

But, although Gibbon was wholly defective in moral 
enthusiasm, his style is vivified by a certain exhila- 
rating glow that kindles a corresponding warmth in 
the bosom of his reader. This may perhaps be traced 
e " 9 



9 8 BIOGRAPHICAL A /YD 

to his egotism, or, to speak more liberally, to an ardent 
attachment to his professional pursuits and to his inex- 
tinguishable love of letters. This enthusiasm appears 
in almost every page of his great work, and enabled 
him to triumph over all its difficulties. It is particu- 
larly conspicuous whenever he touches upon Rome, 
the alma mater of science, whose adopted son he may 
be said to have been from his earliest boyhood. When- 
ever he contemplates her fallen fortunes, he mourns 
over her with the fond solicitude that might become 
an ancient Roman ; and when he depicts her pristine 
glories, dimly seen through the mist of so many cen- 
turies, he does it with such vivid accuracy of concep- 
tion that the reader, like the traveller who wanders 
through the excavations of Pompeii, seems to be 
gazing on the original forms and brilliant colors of 
antiquity. 

To Gibbon's egotism — in its most literal sense, to 
his personal vanity — may be traced some of the pecu- 
liar defects for which his style is conspicuous. The 
"historian of the Decline and Fall" too rarely forgets 
his own importance in that of his subject. The con- 
sequence which he attaches to his personal labors is 
shown in a bloated dignity of expression and an osten- 
tation of ornament that contrast whimsically enough 
with the trifling topics and commonplace thoughts 
on which, in the course of his long work, they are oc- 
casionally employed. He nowhere moves along with 
the easy freedom of nature, but seems to leap, as it 
were, from triad to triad by a succession of strained, 
convulsive efforts. He affected, as he tells us, the 
light, festive raillery of Voltaire ; but his cumbrous 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



99 



imitation of the mercurial Frenchman may remind 
one, to make use of a homely simile, of the ass in 
^Esop's fable, who frisked upon his master in imitation 
of the sportive gambols of the spaniel. The first two 
octavo volumes of Gibbon's history were written in a 
comparatively modest and unaffected manner, for he 
was then uncertain of the public favor ; and, indeed, 
his style was exceedingly commended by the most 
competent critics of that day, as Hume, Joseph War- 
ton, and others, as is abundantly shown in their cor- 
respondence ; but when he had tasted the sweets of 
popular applause, and had been crowned as the his- 
torian of the day, his increased consequence becomes 
at once visible in the assumed stateliness and mag- 
nificence of his bearing. But even after this period, 
whenever the subject is suited to his style, and when 
his phlegmatic temper is warmed by those generous 
emotions of which, as we have said, it was sometimes 
susceptible, he exhibits his ideas in the most splendid 
and imposing forms of which the English language is 
capable. 

The most eminent illustrations of the system of his- 
torical writing, which we have been discussing, that 
have appeared in England in the present century, are 
the works of Mr. Hallam, in which the author, dis- 
carding most of the circumstances that go to make up 
mere narrative, endeavors to fix the attention of the 
reader on the more important features of constitutional 
polity, employing his wide range of materials in strict 
subordination to this purpose. 

But, while history has thus been conducted on 
nearly the same principles in England for the last 



ioo BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

century, a new path has been struck out in France, or, 
rather, an attempt has lately been made there to re- 
trace the old one. M. de Barante, no less estimable 
as a literary critic than as a historian, in the prelimi- 
nary remarks to his " Histoire des Dues de Bourgogne," 
considers the draughts of modern compilers as alto- 
gether wanting in the vivacity and freshness of their 
originals. They tell the reader how he should feel, 
instead of making him do so. They give him their 
own results, instead of enabling him, by a fair delinea- 
tion of incidents, to form his own. And while the 
early chroniclers, in spite of their unformed and ob- 
solete idiom, are still read with delight, the narratives 
of the former are too often dry, languid, and uninter- 
esting. He proposes, therefore, by a close adherence 
to his originals, to extract, as it were, the spirit of 
their works, without any affectation, however, of their 
antiquated phraseology, and to exhibit as vivid and 
veracious a portraiture as possible of the times he is 
delineating, unbroken by any discussions or reflections 
of his own. The result has been a work in eleven 
octavo volumes, which, notwithstanding its bulk, has 
already passed into four editions. 

The two last productions of our countryman Mr. 
Irving undoubtedly fall within the class of narrative 
history. To this he seems peculiarly suited by his 
genius, his fine perception of moral and natural beauty, 
his power of discriminating the most delicate shades 
of character and of unfolding a series of events so as 
to maintain a lively interest in the reader, and a lactea 
ubertas of expression which can impart a living elo- 
quence even to the most commonplace sentiments. 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES, 101 

Had the "Life of Columbus" been written by a his- 
torian of the other school of which we have been 
speaking, he would have enlarged with greater circum- 
stantiality on the system adopted by Ferdinand and 
Isabella for the administration of their colonies and for 
the regulation of trade ; nor would he have neglected 
to descant on a topic — worn somewhat threadbare, it 
must be owned — so momentous as the moral and polit- 
ical consequences of the discovery of America ; neither 
would such a writer, in an account of the conquest of 
Granada, have omitted to collect such particulars as 
might throw light on the genius, social institutions, 
and civil polity of the Spanish Arabs. But all these 
particulars, however pertinent to a philosophical his- 
tory, would have been entirely out of keeping in Mr. 
Irving' s, and might have produced a disagreeable dis- 
cordance in the general harmony of his plan. 

Mr. Irving has seldom selected a subject better suited 
to his peculiar powers than the conquest of Granada. 
Indeed, it would hardly have been possible for one of 
his warm sensibilities to linger so long among the 
remains of Moorish magnificence with which Spain is 
covered, without being interested in the fortunes of a 
people whose memory has almost passed into oblivion, 
but who once preserved the "sacred flame" when it 
had become extinct in every corner of Christendom, 
and whose influence is still visible on the intellectual 
culture of Modern Europe. It has been found no easy 
matter, however, to compile a satisfactory and authen- 
tic account of the Arabians, notwithstanding that the 
number of their historians, cited by D'Herbelot and 
Casiri, would appear to exceed that of any European 

9* 



102 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

nation. The despotic governments of the East have 
never been found propitious to that independence of 
opinion so essential to historical composition: "ubi 
sentire quae velis, et quae sentias dicere licet." And 
their copious compilations, prolific in frivolous and 
barren detail, are too often wholly destitute of the sap 
and vitality of history. 

The social and moral institutions of Arabian Spain 
experienced a considerable modification from her long 
intercourse with the Europeans, and she offers a nobler 
field of research for the chronicler than is to be found 
in any other country of the Moslem. Notwithstanding 
this, the Castilian scholars, until of late, have done 
little towards elucidating the national antiquities of 
their Saracen brethren ; and our most copious notices 
of their political history, until the recent posthumous 
publication of Conde, have been drawn from the ex- 
tracts which M. Cardonne translated from the Arabic 
Manuscripts in the Royal Library at Paris.* 

The most interesting periods of the Saracen do- 
minion in Spain are that embraced by the empire of 
the Omeyades of Cordova, between the years 755 and 
1030, and that of the kingdom of Granada, extending 
from the middle of the thirteenth to the close of the 
fifteenth century. The intervening period of their 
existence in the Peninsula offers only a spectacle of 

* [Since this article was written, the deficiency noticed in the text 
has been supplied by the translation into English of Al-Makkari's 
" Mohammedan Dynasties," with copious notes and illustrations by 
Don Pascual de Gayangos, a scholar whose acute criticism has 
enabled him to rectify many of the errors of his laborious predeces- 
sors, and whose profound Oriental learning sheds a flood of light on 
both the civil and literary history of the Spanish Arabs.] 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



I03 



inextricable anarchy. The first of those periods was 
that in which the Arabs attained their meridian of 
opulence and power, and in which their general illu- 
mination affords a striking contrast with the deep bar- 
barism of the rest of Europe ; but it was that, too, in 
which their character, having been but little affected 
by contact with the Spaniards, retained most of its 
original Asiatic peculiarities. This has never been 
regarded, therefore, by European scholars as a period 
of greatest interest in their history, nor has it ever, so 
far as we are aware, been selected for the purposes of 
romantic fiction. But when their territories became 
reduced within the limits of Granada, the Moors had 
insensibly submitted to the superior influences of their 
Christian neighbors. Their story, at this time, abounds 
in passages of uncommon beauty and interest. Their 
wars were marked by feats of personal prowess and 
romantic adventure, while the intervals of peace were 
abandoned to all the license of luxurious revelry. 
Their character, therefore, blending the various pecu- 
liarities of Oriental and European civilization, offers a 
rich study for the poet and the novelist. As such, it 
has been liberally employed by the Spaniards, and has 
not been altogether neglected by the writers of other 
nations. Thus, Florian, whose sentiments, as well as 
his style, seem to be always floundering midway be- 
tween the regions of prose and poetry, has made out 
of the story of this people his popular romance of 
" Gonsalvo of Cordova." It also forms the burden of 
an Italian epic, entitled "II Conquista di Granata," 
by Girolamo Gratiani, a Florentine, — much lauded 
by his countrymen. The ground, however, before the 



io4 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



appearance of Mr. Irving, had not been occupied by 
any writer of eminence in the English language for 
the purposes either of romance or history. 

The conquest of Granada, to which Mr. Irving has 
confined himself, so disastrous to the Moors, was one 
of the most brilliant achievements in the most brilliant 
period of Spanish history. Nothing is more usual than 
overweening commendations of antiquity, — the "good 
old times" whose harsher features, like those of a 
rugged landscape, lose all their asperity in the dis- 
tance. But the period of which we are speaking, 
embracing the reigns of Ferdinand and Isabella, at 
the close of the fifteenth and beginning of the six- 
teenth centuries, was undoubtedly that in which the 
Spanish nation displayed the fulness of its moral and 
physical energies, when, escaping from the license of 
a youthful age, it seems to have reached the prime of 
manhood and the perfect development of those faculties 
whose overstrained exertions were soon to be followed 
by exhaustion and premature decrepitude. 

The remnant of Spaniards who, retreating to the 
mountains of the north, escaped the overwhelming 
inundation of the Saracens at the beginning of the 
eighth century, continued to cherish the free institu- 
tions of their Gothic ancestors. The "Fuero Juzgo," 
the ancient Visi-Gothic code, was still retained by the 
people of Castile and Leon, and may be said to form 
the basis of all their subsequent legislation, while in 
Aragon the dissolution of the primitive monarchy 
opened the way for even more liberal and equitable 
forms of government. The independence of character 
thus fostered by the peculiar constitutions of these 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



105 



petty states was still farther promoted by the circum- 
stances of their situation. Their uninterrupted wars 
with the infidel — the necessity of winning back from 
him, inch by inch, as it were, the conquered soil — 
required the active co-operation of every class of the 
community, and gave to the mass of the people an 
intrepidity, a personal consequence, and an extent of 
immunities, such as were not enjoyed by them in any 
other country of Europe. The free cities acquired 
considerable tracts of the reconquered territory, with 
rights of jurisdiction over them, and sent their repre- 
sentatives to Cortes, near a century before a similar 
privilege was conceded to them in England. Even 
the peasantry, so degraded, at this period, throughout 
the rest of Europe, assumed under this state of things 
a conscious dignity and importance, which are visible 
in their manners at this day; and it was in this class, 
during the late French invasions, that the fire of ancient 
patriotism revived with greatest force, when it seemed 
almost extinct in the breasts of the degenerate nobles. 
The religious feeling which mingled in their wars 
with the infidels gave to their characters a tinge of 
lofty enthusiasm ; and the irregular nature of this 
warfare suggested abundant topics for that popular 
minstrelsy which acts so powerfully on the passions of 
a people. The " Poem of the Cid," which appeared, 
according to Sanchez, before the middle of the twelfth 
century, contributed in no slight degree, by calling up 
the most inspiring national recollections, to keep alive 
the generous glow of patriotism. This influence is not 
imaginary. Heeren pronounces the "poems of Homer 
to have been the principal bond which united the 



106 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

Grecian states;" and every one knows the influence 
exercised over the Scottish peasantry by the Border 
minstrelsy. Many anecdotes might be quoted to show 
the veneration universally entertained by the Span- 
iards, broken, as they were, into as many discordant 
states as ever swarmed over Greece, for their favorite 
hero of romance and history. Among others, Mari- 
ana relates one of a king of Navarre, who, making an 
incursion into Castile about a century after the war- 
rior's death, was carrying off a rich booty, when he 
was met by an abbot of a neighboring convent, with 
his monks, bearing aloft the standard of the Cid, who 
implored him to restore the plunder to the inhabitants 
from whom he had ravished it. And the monarch, 
moved by the sight of the sacred relic, after complying 
with his request, escorted back the banner in solemn 
procession with his whole army to the place of its 
deposit. 

But, while all these circumstances conspired to give 
an uncommon elevation to the character of the ancient 
Spaniard, even of the humblest rank, and while the 
prerogative of the monarch was more precisely as well 
as narrowly defined than in most of the other nations 
of Christendom, the aristocracy of the country was 
insensibly extending its privileges, and laying the 
foundation of a power that eventually overshadowed 
the throne and well nigh subverted the liberties of 
the state. In addition to the usual enormous immu- 
nities claimed by this order in feudal governments 
(although there is no reason to believe that the system 
of feudal tenure obtained in Castile, as it certainly did 
in Aragon), they enjoyed a constitutional privilege of 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



107 



withdrawing their allegiance from their sovereign on 
sending him a formal notice of such renunciation, and 
the sovereign, on his part, was obliged to provide for 
the security of their estates and families so long as 
they might choose to continue in such overt rebellion. 
These anarchical provisions in their constitution did 
not remain a dead letter, and repeated examples of 
their pernicious application are enumerated both by the 
historians of Aragon and Castile. The long minorities 
with which the latter country was afflicted, moreover, 
contributed still farther to swell the overgrown power 
of the privileged orders ; and the violent revolution 
which, in 1368, placed the house of Trastamarre upon 
the throne, by impairing the revenues, and consequently 
the authority of the crown, opened the way for the wild 
uproar which reigned throughout the kingdom during 
the succeeding century. Alonso de Palencia, a con- 
temporary chronicler, dwells with melancholy minute- 
ness on the calamities of this unhappy period, when 
the whole country was split into factions of the nobles, 
the monarch openly contemned, the commons trodden 
in the dust, the court become a brothel, the treasury 
bankrupt, public faith a jest, and private morals too 
loose and audacious to court even the veil of hypocrisy. 
The wise administration of Ferdinand and Isabella 
could alone have saved the state in this hour of peril-. 
It effected, indeed, a change on the face of things as 
magical as that produced by the wand of an enchanter 
in some Eastern tale. Their reign wears a more glo- 
rious aspect from its contrast with the turbulent period 
which preceded it, as the landscape glows with re- 
doubled brilliancy when the sunshine Iras scattered the 



108 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

tempest. We shall briefly notice some of the features 
of the policy by which they effected this change. 

They obtained from the Cortes an act for the re- 
sumption of the improvident grants made by their 
predecessor, by which means an immense accession of 
revenue, which had been squandered upon unworthy 
favorites, was brought back to the royal treasury. 
They compelled many of the nobility to resign, in 
favor of the crown, such of its possessions as they 
had acquired, by force, fraud, or intrigue, during the 
late season of anarchy. The son of that gallant Mar- 
quis Duke of Cadiz, for instance, with whom the reader 
has become so familiar in Mr. Irving's Chronicle, was 
stripped of his patrimony of Cadiz and compelled to 
exchange it for the humbler territory of Arcos, from 
whence the family henceforth derived their title. By 
all these expedients the revenues of the state at the 
demise of Isabella, were increased twelvefold beyond 
what they had been at the time of her accession. 
They reorganized the ancient institution of the "Her- 
mandad," — a very different association, under their 
hands, from the "Holy Brotherhood" which we meet 
with in Gil Bias. Every hundred householders were 
obliged to equip and maintain a horseman at their 
joint expense ; and this corps furnished a vigilant po- 
lice in civil emergencies and an effectual aid in war. 
It was found, moreover, of especial service in suppress- 
ing the insurrections and disorders of the nobility. 
They were particularly solicitous to abolish the right 
and usage of private war claimed by this haughty 
order, compelling them on all occasions to refer their 
disputes to the constituted tribunals of justice. But 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



109 



it was a capital feature in the policy o" the Catholic 
sovereigns to counterbalance the mthority of the aris- 
tocracy by exalting, as far as prudent, that of the com- 
mons. In the various convocations of the national 
legislature, or Cortes, in this reign, no instance occurs 
of any city having lost its prescriptive right of furnish- 
ing representatives, as had frequently happened under 
preceding monarchs, who, from negligence or policy, 
had omitted to summon them. 

But it would be tedious to go into all the details of 
the system employed by Ferdinand and Isabella for 
the regeneration of the decayed fabric of government; 
of their wholesome regulations for the encouragement 
of industry ; of their organization of a national mi- 
litia and an efficient marine ; of the severe decorum 
which they introduced within the corrupt precincts of 
the court ; of the temporary economy by which they 
controlled the public expenditures, and of the munifi- 
cent patronage which they, or, rather, their almoner 
on this occasion, that most enlightened of bigots, Car- 
dinal Ximenes, dispensed to science and letters. In 
short, their sagacious provisions were not merely reme- 
dial of former abuses, but were intended to call forth 
all the latent energies of the Spanish character, and, 
with these excellent materials to erect a constitution 
of government which should secure to the nation tran- 
quillity at home, and enable it to go forward in its 
ambitious career of discovery and conquest. 

The results were certainly equal to the wisdom of the 
preparations. The first of the series of brilliant enter- 
prises was the conquest of the Moorish kingdom of 
Granada, — those rich and lovely regions of the Penin- 

10 



no BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

sula, the last retreat of the infidel, and which he had 
held for nearly eight centuries. This, together with the 
subsequent occupation of Navarre by the crafty Ferdi- 
nand, consolidated the various principalities of Spain 
into one monarchy, and, by extending its boundaries 
in the Peninsula to their present dimensions, raised it 
from a subordinate situation to the first class of Eu- 
ropean powers. The Italian wars, under the conduct 
of the ''Great Captain," secured to Spain the more 
specious but less useful acquisition of Naples, and 
formed that invincible infantry which enabled Charles 
the Fifth to dictate laws to Europe for nearly half a 
century. And, lastly, as if the Old World could not 
afford a theatre sufficiently vast for their ambition, 
Columbus gave a New World to Castile and Leon. 

Such was the attitude assumed by the nation under 
the Catholic kings, as they were called. It was the 
season of hope and youthful enterprise, when the na- 
tion seemed to be renewing its ancient energies and to 
prepare like a giant to run its course. The modern 
Spaniard who casts his eye over the long interval that 
has since elapsed, during the first half of which the 
nation seemed to waste itself on schemes of mad am- 
bition or fierce fanaticism, and in the latter half to 
sink into a state of paralytic torpor, — the Spaniard, we 
say, who casts a melancholy glance over this dreary 
interval will turn with satisfaction to the close of the 
fifteenth century as the most glorious epoch in the 
annals of his country. This is the period to which 
Mr. Irving has introduced us in his late work. And 
if his portraiture of the Castilian of that day wears 
somewhat of a romantic and, it may be, incredible 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. m 

aspect to those who contrast it with the present, they 
must remember that he is only reviving the tints which 
had faded on the canvas of history. But it is time 
that we should return from this long digression, into 
which we have been led by the desire of exhibiting in 
stronger relief some peculiarities in the situation and 
spirit of the nation at the period from which Mr. 
Irving has selected the materials of his last, indeed, 
his last two publications. 

Our author, in his "Chronicle of Granada," has 
been but slightly indebted to Arabic authorities. 
Neither Conde nor Cardonne has expended more than 
fifty or sixty pages on this humiliating topic ; but 
ample amends have been offered in the copious pro- 
lixity of the Castilian writers. The Spaniards can 
boast a succession of chronicles from the period of the 
great Saracen invasion. Those of a more early date, 
compiled in rude Latin, are sufficiently meagre and 
unsatisfactory; but from the middle of the thirteenth 
century the stream of history runs full and clear, and 
their chronicles, composed in the vernacular, exhibit 
a richness and picturesque variety of incident that gave 
them inestimable value as a body of genuine historical 
documents. The reigns of Ferdinand and Isabella 
were particularly fruitful in these sources of informa- 
tion. History then, like most of the other depart- 
ments of literature, seemed to be in a state of transi- 
tion, when the fashions of its more antiquated costume 
began to mingle insensibly with the peculiarities of the 
modern ; when, in short, the garrulous graces of nar- 
ration were beginning to be tempered by the tone of 
grave and philosophical reflection. 



112 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

We will briefly notice a few of the eminent sources 
from which Mr. Irving has drawn his account of the 
" Conquest of Granada." The first of these is the 
Epistles of Peter Martyr, an Italian savant, who, 
having passed over with the Spanish ambassador into 
Spain, and being introduced into the court of Isabella, 
was employed by her in some important embassies. 
He was personally present at several campaigns of this 
war. In his "Letters" he occasionally smiles at the 
caprice which had led him to exchange the pen for the 
sword, while his speculations on the events passing 
before him, being those of a scholar rather than of a 
soldier, afford in their moral complexion a pleasing 
contrast to the dreary details of blood and battle. 
Another authority is the Chronicle of Bernaldez, a 
worthy ecclesiastic of that period, whose bulky manu- 
script, like that of many a better writer, lies still en- 
gulfed in the dust of some Spanish library, having 
never been admitted to the honors of the press. 
Copies of it, however, are freely circulated. It is 
one of those good-natured, gossiping memorials of an 
antique age, abounding equally in curious and com- 
monplace incident, told in a way sufficiently prolix, 
but not without considerable interest. The testimony 
of this writer is of particular value, moreover, on this 
occasion, from the proximity of his residence in Anda- 
lusia to those scenes which were the seat of the war. 
His style overflows with that religious loyalty with 
which Mr. Irving has liberally seasoned the effusions 
of Fra Antonio Agapida. Hernando del Pulgar, an- 
other contemporary historian, was the secretary and 
counsellor of their Catholic majesties, and appointed 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



"3 



by them to the post of national chronicler, an office 
familiar both to the courts of Castile and Aragon, in 
which latter country, especially, it has been occupied 
by some of its most distinguished historians. Pulgar's 
long residence at court, his practical acquaintance 
with affairs, and, above all, the access which he ob- 
tained, by means of his official station, to the best 
sources of information, have enabled him to make his 
work a rich repository of facts relating to the general 
resources of government, the policy of its administra- 
tion, and, more particularly, the 1 conduct of the mil- 
itary operations in the closing war of Granada, of 
which he was himself an eye-witness. In addition to 
these writers, this period has been illumined by the 
labors of the most celebrated historians of Castile 
and Aragon, Mariana and Zurita, both of whom con- 
clude their narratives with it, the last expanding the 
biography of Ferdinand alone into two volumes folio. 
Besides these, Mr. Irving has derived collateral lights 
from many sources of inferior celebrity but not less un- 
suspicious credit. So that, in conclusion, notwithstand- 
ing a certain dramatic coloring which Fra Agapida's 
"Chronicle" occasionally wears, and notwithstanding 
the romantic forms of a style which, to borrow the 
language of Cicero, seems "to flow, as it were, from 
the very lips of the Muses," we may honestly recom- 
mend it as substantially an authentic record of one of 
the most interesting and, as far as English scholars are 
concerned, one of the most untravelled portions of 
Spanish history. 



10* 



CERVANTES.* 

(July, 1837.) 

The publication, in this country, of an important 
Spanish classic in the original, with a valuable com- 
mentary, is an event of some moment in our literary 
annals, and indicates a familiarity, rapidly increasing, 
with the beautiful literature to which it belongs. It- 
may be received as an omen favorable to the cause of 
modern literature in general, the study of which, in all 
its varieties, may be urged on substantially the same 
grounds. The growing importance attached to this 
branch of education is visible in other countries quite 
as much as in our own. It is the natural, or, rather, 
necessary result of the changes which have taken place 
in the social relations of man in this revolutionary age. 
Formerly a nation, pent up within its own barriers, 
knew less of its neighbors than we now know of what 
is going on in Si am or Japan. A river, a chain of 
mountains, an imaginary line, even, parted them as far 
asunder as if oceans had rolled between. To speak 

* " El Ingenioso Hidalgo Don Quijote de la Mancha, compuesto 
por Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. Nueva Edicion clasica, ilus- 
trada con Notas historicas, gramaticales y criticas, por la Academia 
Espanola, sus Individuos de Numero Pellicer, Arrieta, y Clemencin. 
Enmendada y eorregida por Francisco Sales, A.M., Instructor de 
Frances y Espanol en la Universidad de Harvard, en Cambrigia, 
Estado de Massachusetts, Norte America," 2 vols. i2mo, Boston, 
1836. 

("4) 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



"5 



correctly, it was their imperfect civilization, their ig- 
norance of the means and the subjects of communica- 
tion, which thus kept them asunder. Now, on the 
contrary, a change in the domestic institutions of one 
country can hardly be effected without a corresponding 
agitation in those of its neighbors. A treaty of alliance 
can scarcely be adjusted without the intervention of a 
general Congress. The sword cannot be unsheathed 
in one part of Christendom without thousands leaping 
from their scabbards in every other. The whole sys- 
tem is bound together by as nice sympathies as if ani- 
mated by a common pulse, and the remotest countries 
of Europe are brought into contiguity as intimate as 
were in ancient times the provinces of a single mon- 
archy. 

This intimate association has been prodigiously in- 
creased of late years by the unprecedented discover- 
ies which science has made for facilitating intercom- 
munication. The inhabitants of Great Britain, that 
" ultima Thule" of the ancients, can now run down to 
the extremity of Italy in less time than it took Horace 
to go from Rome to Brundusium. A steamboat of 
fashionable tourists will touch at all the places of note 
in the Iliad and Odyssey in fewer weeks than it would 
have cost years to an ancient Argonaut or a crusader 
of the Middle Ages. Every one, of course, travels, 
and almost every capital and noted watering-place on 
the Continent swarms with its thousands, and Paris 
with its tens of thousands, of itinerant cockneys, many 
of whom, perhaps, have not wandered beyond the 
sound of Bow-bells in their own little island. 

Few of these adventurers are so dull as not to be 



Ii6 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

quickened into something like curiosity respecting the 
language and institutions of the strange people among 
whom they are thrown, while the better sort and more 
intelligent are led to study more carefully the new 
forms, whether in arts or letters, under which human 
genius is unveiled to them. 

The effect of all this is especially visible in the re- 
forms introduced into the modern systems of education. 
In both the universities recently established in London, 
the apparatus for instruction, instead of being limited 
to the ancient tongues, is extended to the whole circle 
of modern literature ; and the editorial labors of many 
of the professors show that they do not sleep on their 
posts. Periodicals, under the management of the ablest 
writers, furnish valuable contributions of foreign crit- 
icism and intelligence; and regular histories of the 
various Continental literatures, a department in which 
the English are singularly barren, are understood to be 
now in actual preparation. 

But, although barren of literary, the English have 
made important contributions to the political history 
of the Continental nations. That of Spain has em- 
ployed some of their best writers, who, it must be 
admitted, however, have confined themselves so far to 
the foreign relations of the country as to have left the 
domestic in comparative obscurity. Thus, Robertson's 
great work is quite as much the history of Europe as of 
Spain under Charles the Fifth; and Watson's "Reign 
of Philip the Second" might with equal propriety be 
styled "The War of the Netherlands," which is its 
principal burden. 

A few works recently published in the United States 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 117 

have shed far more light on the interior organization 
and intellectual culture of the Spanish nation. Such, 
for example, are the writings of Irving, whose gor- 
geous coloring reflects so clearly the chivalrous splendors 
of the fifteenth century, and the travels of Lieutenant 
Slidell, presenting sketches equally animated of the 
social aspect of that most picturesque of all lands in 
the present century. In Mr. Cushing's " Reminis- 
cences of Spain" we find, mingled with much char- 
acteristic fiction, some very laborious inquiries into 
curious and recondite points of history. In the purely 
literary department, Mr. Ticknor's beautiful lectures 
before the classes of Harvard University, still in manu- 
script, embrace a far more extensive range of criticism 
than is to be found in any Spanish work, and display, 
at the same time, a degree of thoroughness and re- 
search which the comparative paucity of materials 
will compel us to look for in vain in Bouterwek or 
Sismondi. Mr. Ticknor's successor, Professor Long- 
fellow, favorably known by other compositions, has 
enriched our language with a noble version of the 
" Coplas de Manrique," the finest gem, beyond all com- 
parison, in the Castilian verse of the fifteenth century. 
We have also read with pleasure a clever translation 
of Quevedo's "Visions," no very easy achievement, 
by Mr. Elliot, of Philadelphia; though the translator 
is wrong in supposing his the first English version. 
The first is as old as Queen Anne's time, and was 
made by the famous Sir Roger L' Estrange. To close 
the account, Mr. Sales, the venerable instructor in 
Harvard College, has now given, for the first time in 
the New World, an elaborate edition of the prince of 



Il8 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

Castilian classics, in a form which may claim, to a 
certain extent, the merit of originality. 

We shall postpone the few remarks we have to make 
on this edition to the close of our article ; and in the 
mean time we propose, not to give the life of Cer- 
vantes, but to notice such points as are least familiar 
in his literary history, and especially in regard to the 
composition and publication of his great work, the 
Don Quixote ; a work which, from its wide and long- 
established popularity, may be said to constitute part 
of the literature not merely of Spain, but of every 
country in Europe. 

The age of Cervantes was that of Philip the Second, 
when the Spanish monarchy, declining somewhat from 
its palmy state, was still making extraordinary efforts 
to maintain, and even to extend, its already overgrown 
empire. Its navies were on every sea, and its armies 
in every quarter of the Old World and in the New. 
Arms was the only profession worthy of a gentleman ; 
and there was scarcely a writer of any eminence — cer- 
tainly no bard — of the age, who, if he were not in 
orders, had not borne arms, at some period, in the 
service of his country. Cervantes, who, though poor, 
was born of an ancient family (it must go hard with a 
Castilian who cannot make out a pedigree for himself), 
had a full measure of this chivalrous spirit, and during 
the first half of his life we find him in the midst of all 
the stormy and disastrous scenes of the iron trade of 
war. His love of the military profession, even after 
the loss of his hand, or of the use of it, for it is uncer- 
tain which, is sufficient proof of his adventurous spirit. 
In the course of his checkered career he visited the 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



119 



principal countries in the Mediterranean, and passed 
five years in melancholy captivity at Algiers. The 
time was not lost, however, which furnished his keen 
eye with those glowing pictures of Moslem luxury and 
magnificence with which he has enriched his pages. 
After a life of unprecedented hardship, he returned to 
his own country, covered with laurels and scars, with 
very little money in his pocket, but with plenty of that 
experience which, regarding him as a novelist, might 
be considered his stock in trade. 

The poet may draw from the depths of his own 
fancy; the scholar, from his library; but the proper 
study of the dramatic writer, whether in verse or in 
prose, is man, — man as he exists in society. He who 
would faithfully depict human character cannot study 
it too nearly and variously. He must sit down, like 
Scott, by the fireside of the peasant and listen to the 
" auld wife's" tale; he must preside, with Fielding, 
at a petty justice sessions, or share with some Squire 
Western in the glorious hazards of a fox-hunt ; he 
must, like Smollett and Cooper, study the mysteries of 
the deep, and mingle on the stormy element itself with 
the singular beings whose destinies he is to describe ; 
or, like Cervantes, he must wander among other races 
and in other climes, before his pencil can give those 
chameleon touches which reflect the shifting, many- 
colored hues of actual life. He may, indeed, like 
Rousseau, if it were possible to imagine another Rous- 
seau, turn his thoughts inward, and draw from the 
depths of his own soul ; but he would see there only 
his own individual passions and prejudices, and the 
portraits he might sketch, however various in subordi- 



120 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

Date details, would be, in their characteristic features, 
only the reproduction of himself. He might, in short, 
be a poet, a philosopher, but not a painter of life and 
manners. 

Cervantes had ample means for pursuing the study 
of human character, after his return to Spain, in the 
active life which engaged him in various parts of the 
country. In Andalusia he might have found the models 
of the sprightly wit and delicate irony with which he 
has seasoned his fictions ; in Seville, in particular, he 
was brought in contact with the fry of small sharpers 
and pickpockets who make so respectable a figure in 
his picaresco novels ; and in La Mancha he not only 
found the geography of his Don Quixote, but that 
whimsical contrast of pride and poverty in the na- 
tives, which has furnished the outlines of many a 
broad caricature to the comic writers of Spain. 

During all this while he had made himself known 
only by his pastoral fiction, the "Galatea," a beautiful 
specimen of an insipid class, which, with all its literary 
merits, afforded no scope for the power of depicting 
human character, which he possessed, perhaps, un- 
known to himself. He wrote, also, a good number 
of plays, all of which, except two, and these recov- 
ered only at the close of the last century, have per- 
ished. One of these, "The Siege of Numantia," 
displays that truth of drawing and strength of color 
which mark the consummate artist. It was not until 
he had reached his fifty-seventh year that he completed 
the First Part of his great work, the Don Quixote. 
The most celebrated novels, unlike most works of 
imagination, seem to have been the production of the 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 12 i 

later period of life. 1 ielding was between forty and 
fifty when he wrote "Tom Jones;" Richardson was 
sixty, or very near it, when he wrote "Clarissa;" and 
Scott was some years over forty when he began the 
series of the Waverley novels. The world, the school 
of the novelist, cannot be run through like the terms 
of a university, and the knowledge of its manifold va- 
rieties must be the result of long and diligent training. 

The First Part . of the Quixote was begun, as the 
author tells us, in a prison, to which he had been 
brought, not by crime or debt, but by some offence, 
probably, to the worthy people of La Mancha. It is 
not the only work of genius which has struggled into 
being in such unfavorable quarters. The "Pilgrim's 
Progress," the most popular, probably, of English 
fictions, was composed under similar circumstances. 
But we doubt if such brilliant fancies and such flashes 
of humor ever lighted up the walls of the prison-house 
before the time of Cervantes. 

The First Part of the Don Quixote was given to the 
public in 1605. Cervantes, when the time arrived for 
launching his satire against the old, deep-rooted preju- 
dices of his countrymen, probably regarded it, as well 
he might, as little less rash than his own hero's tilt 
against the windmills. He sought, accordingly, to 
shield himself under the cover of a powerful name, 
and asked leave to dedicate the book to a Castilian 
grandee, the Duke de Bejar. The duke, it is said, 
whether ignorant of the design or doubting the success 
of the work, would have declined, but Cervantes urged 
him first to peruse a single chapter. The audience 
summoned to sit in judgment were so delighted with 

F II 



122 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

the first pages that they would not abandon the novel 
till they had heard the whole of it. The duke, of 
course, without farther hesitation, condescended to 
allow his name to be inserted in this passport to 
immortality. 

There is nothing very improbable in the story. It 
reminds one of a similar experiment by St. Pierre, who 
submitted his manuscript of "Paul and Virginia" to 
a circle of French litterateurs , Monsieur and Madame 
Necker, the Abbe Galiani, Thomas, Buffon, and some 
others, all wits of the first water in the metropolis. 
Hear the result, in the words of his biographer, or, 
rather, his agreeable translator: "At first the author 
was heard in silence ; by degrees the attention grew 
languid ; they began to whisper, to gape, and listened 
no longer. M. de BurTon looked at his watch, and 
called for his horses; those near the door slipped out; 
Thomas went to sleep ; M. Necker laughed to see the 
ladies weep; and the ladies, ashamed of their tears, 
did not dare to confess that they had been interested. 
The reading being finished, nothing was praised. 
Madame Necker alone criticised the conversation of 
Paul and the old man. This moral appeared to her 
tedious and commonplace: it broke the action, chilled 
the reader, and was a sort of glass of iced water. M. 
de St. Pierre retired in a state of indescribable depres- 
sion. He regarded what had passed as his sentence 
of death. The effect of his work on an audience like 
that to which he had read it left him no hope for the 
future." Yet this work was "Paul and Virginia," one 
of the most popular books in the French language. So 
much for criticism ! 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



123 



The truth seems to be, that the judgment of no pri- 
vate circle, however well qualified by taste and talent, 
can afford a sure prognostic of that of the great public. 
If the manuscript to be criticised is our friend's, of 
course the verdict is made up before perusal. If some 
great man modestly sues for our approbation, our self- 
complacency has been too much flattered for us to 
withhold it. If it be a little man (and St. Pierre was 
but a little man at that time), our prejudices — the 
prejudices of poor human nature — will be very apt to 
take an opposite direction. Be the cause what it may,- 
whoever rests his hopes of public favor on the smiles 
of a coterie runs the risk of finding himself very un- 
pleasantly deceived. Many a trim bark which has 
flaunted gayly in a summer lake has gone to pieces 
amid the billows and breakers of the rude ocean. 

The prognostic in the case of Cervantes, however, 
proved more correct. His work produced an instan- 
taneous effect on the community. He had struck a 
note which found an echo in every bosom. Four 
editions were published in the course of the first year, 
— two in Madrid, one in Valencia, and another at 
Lisbon. 

This success, almost unexampled in any age, was 
still more extraordinary in one in which the reading 
public was comparatively limited. That the book 
found its way speedily into the very highest circles in 
the kingdom is evident from the well-known explana- 
tion of Philip the Third when he saw a student laugh- 
ing immoderately over some volume : "The man must 
be either out of his wits, or reading Don Quixote." 
Notwithstanding this, its author felt none of that sun- 



124 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



shine of royal favor which would have been so grateful 
in his necessities. 

The period was that of the golden prime of Cas- 
tilian literature. But the monarch on the throne, one 
of the ill-starred dynasty of Austria, would have been 
better suited to the darkest of the Middle Ages. His 
hours, divided between his devotions and his debauch- 
eries, left nothing to spare for letters; and his minister, 
the arrogant Duke of Lerma, was too much absorbed 
by his own selfish though shallow schemes of policy to 
trouble himself with romance-writers, or their satirist. 
Cervantes, however, had entered on a career which, as 
he intimates in some of his verses, might lead to fame, 
but not to fortune. Happily, he did not compromise 
his fame by precipitating the execution of his works 
from motives of temporary profit. It was not till sev- 
eral years after the publication of the Don Quixote 
that he gave to the world his Exemplary Novels, as he 
called them, — fictions which, differing from any thing 
before known, not only in the Castilian, but, in some 
respects, in any other literature, gave ample scope to 
his dramatic talent, in the contrivance of situations 
and the nice delineation of character. These works, 
whose diction was uncommonly rich and attractive, 
were popular from the first. 

One cannot but be led to inquire why, with such 
success as an author, he continued to be so straitened 
in his circumstances, as he plainly intimates was the 
case more than once in his writings. From the Don 
Quixote, notwithstanding its great run, he probably 
received little, since he had parted with the entire 
copyright before publication, when the work was re- 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 125 

garded as an experiment the result of which was quite 
doubtful. It is not so easy to explain the difficulty 
when his success as an author had been so completely 
established. Cervantes intimates his dissatisfaction, in 
more than one place in his writings, with the book- 
sellers themselves. "What, sir!" replies an author 
introduced into his Don Quixote, "would you have 
me sell the profit of my labor to a bookseller for three 
maravedis a sheet ? for that is the most they will bid, 
nay, and expect, too, I should thank them for the 
offer." This burden of lamentation, the alleged illib- 
erally of the publisher towards the poor author, is as 
old as the art of book-making itself. But the public 
receive the account from the party aggrieved only. If 
the bookseller reported his own case, we should, no 
doubt, have a different version. If Cervantes was in 
the right, the trade in Castile showed a degree of 
dexterity in their proceedings which richly entitled 
them to the pillory. In one of his tales we find a 
certain licentiate complaining of "the tricks and de- 
ceptions they put upon an author when they buy a 
copyright from him; and still more, the manner in 
which they cheat him if he prints the book at his own 
charges ; since nothing is more common than for them 
to agree for fifteen hundred, and have privily, perhaps, 
as many as three thousand thrown off, one-half, at the 
least, of which they sell, not for his profit, but their 
own." 

The writings of Cervantes appear to have gained 
him, however, two substantial friends in Cabra, the 
Count of Lemos, and the Archbishop of Toledo, of 
the ancient family of Rojas; and the patronage of these 

11* 



I2 6 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

illustrious individuals has been nobly recompensed by 
having their names forever associated with the imper- 
ishable productions of genius. 

There was still one kind of patronage wanting in 
this early age, that of a great, enlightened community, 
— the only patronage which can be received without 
some sense of degradation by a generous mind. There 
was, indeed, one golden channel of public favor, and 
that was the theatre. The drama has usually flourished 
most at the period when a nation is beginning to taste 
the sweets of literary culture. Such was the early 
part of the seventeenth century in Europe; the age 
of Shakspeare, Jonson, and Fletcher in England ; of 
Ariosto, Machiavelli, and the wits who first successfully 
wooed the comic muse of Italy ; of the great Cor- 
neille, some years later, in France; and of that mir- 
acle, or, rather, "monster of nature," as Cervantes 
styled him, Lope de Vega in Spain. Theatrical ex- 
hibitions are a combination of the material with the 
intellectual, at which the ordinary spectator derives 
less pleasure, probably, from the beautiful creations of 
the poet than from the scenic decorations, music, and 
other accessories which address themselves to the 
senses. The fondness for spectacle is characteristic of 
an early period of society, and the theatre is the most 
brilliant of pageants. With the progress of education 
and refinement, men become less open to, or, at least, 
less dependent on, the pleasures of sense, and seek 
their enjoyment in more elevated and purer sources. 
Thus it is that, instead of 

" Sweating in the crowded theatre, squeezed 
And bored with elbow-points through both our sides," 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 127 

as the sad minstrel of nature sings, we sit quietly at 
home, enjoying the pleasures of fiction around our 
own firesides, and the poem or the novel takes the 
place of the acted drama. The decline of dramatic 
writing may justly be lamented as that of one of the 
most beautiful varieties in the garden of literature. 
But it must be admitted to be both a symptom and a 
necessary consequence of the advance of civilization. 

The popularity of the stage, at the period of which 
we are speaking, in Spain, was greatly augmented by 
the personal influence and reputation of Lope de Vega, 
the idol of his countrymen, who threw off the various 
inventions of his genius with a rapidity and profusion 
that almost staggers credibility. It is impossible to 
state the results of his labors in any form that will not 
powerfully strike the imagination. Thus, he has left 
twenty-one million three hundred thousand verses in 
print, besides a mass of manuscript. He furnished 
the theatre, according to the statement of his intimate 
friend Montalvan, with eighteen hundred regular plays, 
and four hundred autos or religious dramas, — all acted. 
He composed, according to his own statement, more 
than one hundred comedies in the almost incredible 
space of twenty-four hours each, and a comedy aver- 
aged between two and three thousand verses, great part 
of them rhymed and interspersed with sonnets and 
other more difficult forms of versification. He lived 
seventy-two years ; and supposing him to have em- 
ployed fifty of that period in composition, although he 
filled a variety of engrossing vocations during that 
time, he must have averaged a play a week, to say 
nothing of twenty-one volumes quarto of miscella- 



128 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

neous works, including five epics, written in his leisure 
moments, and all now in print ! 

The only achievements we can recall in literary his- 
tory bearing any resemblance to, though falling far 
short of this, are those of our illustrious contemporary 
Sir Walter Scott. The complete edition of his works, 
recently advertised by Murray, with the addition of two 
volumes of which Murray has not the copyright, prob- 
ably contains ninety volumes small octavo. To these 
should farther be added a large supply of matter for the 
Edinburgh Annual Register, as well as other anony- 
mous contributions. Of these, forty-eight volumes of 
novels and twenty-one of history and biography were 
produced between 1814 and 1831, or in seventeen 
years. These would give an average of four volumes 
a year, or one for every three months during the whole 
of that period, to which must be added twenty-one 
volumes of poetry and prose previously published. 
The mere mechanical execution of so much work, 
both in his case and Lope de Vega's, would seem to 
be scarce possible in the limits assigned. Scott, too, 
was as variously occupied in other ways as his Spanish 
rival, and probably, from the social hospitality of his 
life, spent a much larger portion of his time in no 
literary occupation at all. 

Notwithstanding we have amused ourselves, at the 
expense of the reader's patience perhaps, with these 
calculations, this certainly is not the standard by which 
we should recommend to estimate works of genius. 
Wit is not to be measured, like broadcloth, by the 
yard. Easy writing, as the adage says, and as we all 
know, is apt to be very hard reading. This brings to 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



129 



our recollection a conversation, in the presence of 
Captain Basil Hall, in which, some allusion having 
been made to the astonishing amount of Scott's daily 
composition, the literary argonaut remarked, "There 
was nothing astonishing in all that, and that he did 
as much himself nearly every day before breakfast." 
Some one of the company unkindly asked "whether 
he thought the quality was the same." It is the 
quality, undoubtedly, which makes the difference. 
And in this view Lope de Vega's miracles lose much 
of their effect. Of all his multitudinous dramas, one 
or two only retain possession of the stage, and few, 
very few, are now even read. His facility of com- 
position was like that of an Italian improvisatore, whose 
fertile fancy easily clothes itself in verse, in a language 
the vowel terminations of which afford such a pleni- 
tude of rhymes. The Castilian presents even greater 
facilities for this than the Italian. Lope de Vega was 
an improvisatore. 

With all his negligences and defects, however, 
Lope's interesting intrigues, easy, sprightly dialogue, 
infinite variety of inventions, and the breathless ra- 
pidity with which they followed one another, so daz- 
zled and bewildered the imagination that he completely 
controlled the public, and became, in the words of 
Cervantes, "sole monarch of the stage." The public 
repaid him with such substantial gratitude as has never 
been shown, probably, to any other of its favorites. 
His fortune at one time, although he was careless 
of his expenses, amounted to one hundred thousand 
ducats, equal, probably, to between seven and eight 
hundred thousand dollars of the present day. In the 

F* 



13° 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



same street in which dwelt this spoiled child of for- 
tune, who, amid the caresses of the great and the 
lavish smiles of the public, could complain that his 
merits were neglected, lived Cervantes, struggling 
under adversity, or at least earning a painful subsist- 
ence by the labors of his immortal pen. What a con- 
trast do these pictures present to the imagination ! 
If the suffrages of a cote?'ie, as we have said, afford no 
warrant for those of the public, the example before us 
proves that the award of one's contemporaries is quite 
as likely to be set aside by posterity. Lope de Vega, 
who gave his name to his age, has now fallen into 
neglect even among his countrymen, while the fame 
of Cervantes, gathering strength with time, has be- 
come the pride of his own nation, as his works still 
continue to be the delight of the whole civilized world. 
However stinted may have been the recompense of 
his deserts at home, it is gratifying to observe how 
widely his fame was diffused in his own lifetime, and 
that in foreign countries, at least, he enjoyed the full 
consideration to which he was entitled. An interest- 
ing anecdote illustrating this is recorded, which, as we 
have never seen it in English, we will lay before the 
reader. On occasion of a visit made by the Arch- 
bishop of Toledo to the French ambassador resident 
at Madrid, the prelate's suite fell into conversation 
with the attendants of the minister, in the course of 
which Cervantes was mentioned. The French gen- 
tlemen expressed their unqualified admiration of his 
writings, specifying the Galatea, Don Quixote, and the 
Novels, which, they said, were read in all the countries 
round, and in France particularly, where there were 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 131 

some who might be said to know them actually by 
heart. They intimated their desire to become per- 
sonally acquainted with so eminent a man, and asked 
many questions respecting his present occupations, his 
circumstances, and way of life. To all this the Cas- 
tilians could only reply that he had borne arms in the 
service of his country, and was now old and poor. 
"What!" exclaimed one of the strangers, "is Sefior 
Cervantes not in good circumstances ? Why is he 
not maintained, then, out of the public treasury?" 
"Heaven forbid," rejoined another, "that his neces- 
sities should be ever relieved, if it is these which make 
him write, since it is his poverty that makes the world 
rich." 

There are other evidences, though not of so pleas- 
ing a character, of the eminence which he had reached 
at home, in the jealousy and ill will of his brother 
poets. The Castilian poets of that day seem to have 
possessed a full measure of that irritability which has 
been laid at the door of all their tribe since the days 
of Horace ; and the freedom of Cervantes' s literary 
criticisms in his Don Quixote and other writings, 
though never personal in their character, brought 
down on his head a storm of arrows, some of which, 
if not sent with much force, were at least well steeped 
in venom. Lope de Vega is even said to have appeared 
among the assailants, and a sonnet, still preserved, is 
currently imputed to him, in which, after much eulogy 
on himself, he predicts that the works of his rival will 
find their way into the kennel. But the author of this 
bad prophecy and worse poetry could never have been 
the great Lope, who showed on all occasions a gen- 



I 3 2 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



erous spirit, and whose literary success must have made 
such an assault unnecessary and in the highest degree 
unmanly. On the contrary, we have evidence of a 
very different feeling, in the homage which he renders 
to the merits of his illustrious contemporary in more 
than one passage of his acknowledged works, espe- 
cially in his " Laurel de Apolo," in which he concludes 
his poetical panegyric with the. following touching 
conceit : 

" Porque se diga que una mano herida 
Pudo dar a su duefio eterna vida." 

This poem was published by Lope in 1630, fourteen 
years after the death of his rival ; notwithstanding, 
Mr. Lockhart informs his readers, in his biographical 
preface to the Don Quixote, that "as Lope de Vega 
was dead (1615), there was no one to divide with 
Cervantes the literary empire of his country." 

In the dedication of his ill-fated comedies, 161 5 (for 
Cervantes, like most other celebrated novelists, found 
it difficult to concentrate his expansive vein within the 
compass of dramatic rules), the public was informed 
that "Don Quixote was already booted" and pre- 
paring for another sally. It may seem strange that the 
author, considering the great popularity of his hero, 
had not sent him on his adventures before. But he 
had probably regarded them as already terminated ; 
and he had good reason to do so, since every incident 
in the First Part, as it has been styled only since the 
publication of the Second, is complete in itself, and 
the Don, although not actually killed on the stage, is 
noticed as dead, and his epitaph transcribed for the 
reader. However this may be, the immediate execu- 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



*33 



tion of his purpose, so long delayed, was precipitated 
by an event equally unwelcome and unexpected. This 
was the continuation of his work by another hand. 

The author's name, his nom de guerre, was Avella- 
neda, a native of Tordesillas. Adopting the original 
idea of Cervantes, he goes forward with the same char- 
acters, through similar scenes of comic extravagance, 
in the course of which he perpetrates sundry plagiar- 
isms from the First Part, and has some incidents so 
much resembling those in the Second Part, already 
written by Cervantes, that it has been supposed he 
must have had access to his manuscript. It is more 
probable, as the resemblance is but general, that he 
obtained his knowledge through hints which may have 
fallen in conversation from Cervantes in the progress 
of his own work. The spurious continuation had some 
little merit, and attracted, probably, some interest, as 
any work conducted under so popular a name could 
not have failed to do. It was, however, on the whole, 
a vulgar performance, thickly sprinkled with such gross 
scurrility and indecency as was too strong even for the 
palate of that not very fastidious age. The public 
feeling may be gathered from the fact that the author 
did not dare to depart from his incognito and claim 
the honors x)f a triumph. The most diligent inquiries 
have established nothing farther than that he was an 
Aragonese, judging from his diction, and, from the 
complexion of certain passages in the work, proba- 
bly an ecclesiastic, and one of the swarm of small 
dramatists who felt themselves rudely handled by the 
criticism of Cervantes. The work was subsequently 
translated, or rather paraphrased, by Le Sage, who has 

12 



134 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



more than once given a substantial value to gems of 
little price in Castilian literature by the brilliancy of 
his setting. The original work of Avellaneda, always 
deriving an interest from the circumstances of its pro- 
duction, has been reprinted in the present century, 
and is not difficult to be met with. To have thus 
coolly invaded an author's own property, to have 
filched from him the splendid though unfinished crea- 
tions of his genius before his own face, and while, as 
was publicly known, he was in the very process of 
completing them, must be admitted to be an act of 
unblushing effrontery not surpassed in the annals of 
literature. 

Cervantes was much annoyed, it appears, by the cir- 
cumstance. The continuation of Avellaneda reached 
him, probably, when on the fifty-ninth chapter of the 
Second Part. At least, from that time he begins to 
discharge his gall on the head of the offender, who, it 
should be added, had consummated his impudence by 
sneering, in his introduction, at the qualifications of 
Cervantes. The best retort of the latter, however, was 
the publication of his own book, which followed at the 
close of 1 615. 

The English novelist Richardson experienced a treat- 
ment not unlike that of the Castilian^ His popular 
story of Pamela was continued by another and very 
inferior hand, under the title of "Pamela in High 
Life." The circumstance prompted Richardson to 
undertake the continuation himself; and it turned out, 
like most others, a decided failure. Indeed, a skilful 
continuation seems to be the most difficult work of art. 
The first effort of the author breaks, as it were, unex- 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



135 



pectedly on the public, taking their judgments by sur- 
prise, and by its very success creating a standard by 
which the author himself is subsequently to be tried. 
Before, he was compared with others ; he is now to be 
compared with himself. The public expectation has 
been raised. A degree of excellence which might 
have found favor at first will now scarcely be tolerated. 
It will not even suffice for him to maintain his own 
level. He must rise above himself. The reader, in 
the mean while, has naturally filled up the blank, and 
insensibly conducted the characters and the story to a 
termination in his own way. As the reality seldom 
keeps pace with the ideal, the author's execution will 
hardly come up to the imagination of his readers ; 
at any rate, it will differ from them, and so far be 
displeasing. We experience something of this dis- 
appointment in the dramas borrowed from popular 
novels, where the development of the characters by 
the dramatic author, and the new direction given to 
the original story in his hands, rarely fail to offend the 
taste and preconceived ideas of the spectator. To feel 
the force of this, it is only necessary to see the Guy 
Mannering, Rob Roy, and other plays dramatized from 
the Waverley novels. 

Some part of the failure of such continuations is, no 
doubt, fairly chargeable, in most instances, on the au- 
thor himself, who goes to his new task with little of his 
primitive buoyancy and vigor. He no longer feels the 
same interest in his own labors, which, losing their 
freshness, have become as familiar to his imagination 
as a thrice-told tale. The new composition has, of 
course, a different complexion from the former, cold, 



136 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

stiff, and disjointed, like a bronze statue whose parts 
have been separately put together, instead of being 
cast in one mould when the whole metal was in a state 
of fusion. 

The continuation of Cervantes forms a splendid 
exception to the general rule. The popularity of his 
First Part had drawn forth abundance of criticism, and 
he availed himself of it to correct some material blem- 
ishes in the design of the Second, while an assiduous 
culture of the Castilian enabled him to enrich his style 
with greater variety and beauty. 

He had now reached the zenith of his fame, and the 
profits of his continuation may have relieved the pecu- 
niary embarrassments under which he had struggled. 
But he was not long to enjoy his triumph. Before his 
death, which took place in the following year, he com- 
pleted his romance of "Persiles and Sigismunda," the 
dedication to which, written a few days before his 
death, is strongly characteristic of its writer. It is 
addressed to his old patron, the Conde de Lemos, then 
absent from the country. After saying, in the words 
of the old Spanish proverb, that he had " one foot in 
the stirrup^'' in allusion to the distant journey on which 
he was soon to set out, he adds, "Yesterday I received 
the extreme unction ; but, now that the shadows of 
death are closing around me, I still cling to life, from 
the love of it, as well as from the desire to behold you 
again. But if it is decreed otherwise (and the will of 
Heaven be done), your excellency will at least feel 
assured there was one person whose wish to serve you 
was greater than the love of life itself." After these 
reminiscences of his benefactor, he expresses his own 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



137 



purpose, should life be spared, to complete several 
works he had already begun. Such were the last words 
of this illustrious man ; breathing the same generous 
sensibility, the same, ardent love of letters and beauti- 
ful serenity of temper which distinguished him through 
life. He died a few days after, on the 23d of April, 
1 61 6. His remains were laid, without funeral pomp, 
in the monastery of the Holy Trinity at Madrid. No 
memorial points out the spot to the eye of the travel- 
ler, nor is it known at this day. And, while many a 
costly construction has been piled on the ashes of the 
little great, to the shame of Spain be it spoken, no 
monument has yet been erected in honor of the greatest 
genius she has produced. He has built, however, a 
monument for himself more durable than brass or 
sculptured marble. 

Don Quixote is too familiar to the reader to require 
any analysis ; but we will enlarge on a few circum- 
stances attending its composition but little known to 
the English scholar, which may enable him to form a 
better judgment for himself. The age of chivalry, as 
depicted in romances, could never, of course, have 
had any real existence ; but the sentiments which are 
described as animating that age have been found more 
or less operative in different countries and different 
periods of society. In Spain, especially, this influence 
is to be discerned from a very early date. Its inhab- 
itants may be said to have lived in a romantic atmo- 
sphere, in which all the extravagances of chivalry were 
nourished by their peculiar situation. Their hostile 
relations with the Moslem kept alive the full glow of 
religious and patriotic feeling. Their history is one 

12* 



1 38 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

interminable crusade. An enemy always on the bor- 
ders invited perpetual displays of personal daring and 
adventure. The refinement and magnificence of the 
Spanish Arabs throw a lustre over these contests such 
as could not be reflected from the rude skirmishes 
with their Christian neighbors. Lofty sentiments, em- 
bellished by the softer refinements of courtesy, were 
blended in the martial bosom of the Spaniard, and 
Spain became emphatically the land of romantic chiv- 
alry. 

The very laws themselves, conceived in this spirit, 
contributed greatly to foster it. The ancient code of 
Alfonso the Tenth, in the thirteenth century, after 
many minute regulations for the deportment of the 
good knight, enjoins on him to "invoke the name of 
his mistress in the fight, that it may infuse new ardor 
into his soul and preserve him from the commission 
of unknightly actions." Such laws were not a dead 
letter. The history of Spain shows that the sentiment 
of romantic gallantry penetrated the nation more 
deeply and continued longer than in any other quarter 
of Christendom. 

Foreign chroniclers, as well as domestic, of the 
fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, notice the frequent 
appearance of Spanish knights in different courts of 
Europe, whither they had travelled, in the language of 
an old writer, " to seek honor and reverence" by their 
feats of arms. In the Paston Letters, written in the 
time of Henry the Sixth of England, we find a notice 
of a Castilian knight who presented himself before the 
court, and, with his mistress's favor around his arm, 
challenged the English cavaliers "to run a course of 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



1 39 



sharp spears with him for his sovereign lady's sake." 
Pulgar, a Spanish chronicler of the close of the six- 
teenth century, speaks of this roving knight-errantry 
as a thing of familiar occurrence among the young 
cavaliers of his day; and Oviedo, who lived somewhat 
later, notices the necessity under which every true 
knight found himself of being in love, ox feigning to 
be so, in order to give a suitable lustre and incentive to 
his achievements. But the most singular proof of the 
extravagant pitch to which these romantic feelings 
were carried in Spain occurs in the account of the 
jousts appended to the fine old chronicle of Alvaro 
de Luna, published by the Academy in 1784. The 
principal champion was named Sueno de Quenones, 
who, with nine companions in arms, defended a pass 
at Orbigo, not far from the shrine of Compostella, 
against all comers, in the presence of King John the 
Second and his court. The object of this passage 
of arms, as it was called, was to release the knight 
from the obligation imposed on him by his mistress of 
publicly wearing an iron collar round his neck every 
Thursday. The jousts continued for thirty days, and 
the doughty champions fought without shield or target, 
with weapons bearing points of Milan steel. Six hun- 
dred and twenty-seven encounters took place, and one 
hundred and sixty-six lances were broken, when the 
emprise was declared to be fairly achieved. The whole 
affair is narrated, with becoming gravity, by an eye- 
witness, and the reader may fancy himself perusing 
the adventures of a Launcelot or an Amadis. The 
particulars of this tourney are detailed at length in 
Mills's Chivalry (vol. ii. chap, v.), where, however, the 



140 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



author has defrauded the successful champions of their 
full honors by incorrectly reporting the number of 
lances broken as only sixty-six. 

The taste for these romantic extravagances naturally 
fostered a corresponding taste for the perusal of tales 
of chivalry. Indeed, they acted reciprocally on each 
other. These chimerical legends had once, also, be- 
guiled the long evenings of our Norman ancestors, but, 
in the progress of civilization, had gradually given 
way to other and more natural forms of composition. 
They still maintained their ground in Italy, whither 
they had passed later, and where they were consecrated 
by the hand of genius. But Italy was not the true 
soil of chivalry, and the inimitable fictions of Bojardo, 
Pulci, and Ariosto were composed with that lurking 
smile of half-suppressed mirth which, far from a serious 
tone, could raise only a corresponding smile of incre- 
dulity in the reader. 

In Spain, however, the marvels of romance were all 
taken in perfect good faith. Not that they were re- 
ceived as literally true; but the reader surrendered 
himself up to the illusion, and was moved to admi- 
ration by the recital of deeds which, viewed in any 
other light than as a wild frolic of imagination, would 
be supremely ridiculous; for these tales had not the 
merit of a seductive style and melodious versification 
to relieve them. They were, for the most part, an ill- 
digested mass of incongruities, in which there was as 
little keeping and probability in the characters as in 
the incidents, while the whole was told in that stilted 
" Hercles' vein" and with that licentiousness of allu- 
sion and imagery which could not fail to debauch both 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 141 

the taste and the morals of the youthful reader. The 
mind, familiarized with these monstrous, over-colored 
pictures, lost all relish for the chaste and sober produc- 
tions of art. The love of the gigantic and the marvel- 
lous indisposed the reader for the simple delineations of 
truth in real history. The feelings expressed by a sen- 
sible Spaniard of the sixteenth century, the anonymous 
author of the "Dialogo de las Lenguas," probably 
represent those of many of his contemporaries. "Ten 
of the best years of my life," says he, " were spent no 
more profitably than in devouring these lies, which I 
did even while eating my meals ; and the consequence 
of this depraved appetite was, that if I took in hand 
any true book of history, or one that passed for such, 
I was unable to wade through it." 

The influence of this meretricious taste was nearly 
as fatal on the historian himself as on his readers, since 
he felt compelled to minister to the public appetite 
such a mixture of the marvellous in all his narrations 
as materially discredited the veracity of his writings. 
Every hero became a demigod, who put the labors of 
Hercules to shame ; and every monk or old hermit 
was converted into a saint, who wrought more mira- 
cles, before and after death, than would have sufficed 
to canonize a monastery. The fabulous ages of Greece 
are scarcely more fabulous than the close of the Middle 
Ages in Spanish history, which compares very discred- 
itably, in this particular, with similar periods in most 
European countries. The confusion of fact and fiction 
continues to a very late age ; and as one gropes his 
way through the twilight of tradition he is at a loss 
whether the dim objects are men or shadows. The 



142 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

most splendid names in Castilian annals — names incor- 
porated with the glorious achievements of the land, 
and embalmed alike in the page of the chronicler and 
the song of the minstrel — names associated with the 
most stirring, patriotic recollections — are now found 
to have been the mere coinage of fancy. There seems 
to be no more reason for believing in the real exist- 
ence of Bernardo del Carpio, of whom so much has 
been said and sung, than in that of Charlemagne's 
paladins, or of the Knights of the Round Table. 
Even the Cid, the national hero of Spain, is con- 
tended, by some of the shrewdest native critics of our 
own times, to be an imaginary being; and it is certain 
that the splendid fabric of his exploits, familiar as 
household words to every Spaniard, has crumbled to 
pieces under the rude touch of modern criticism. 
These heroes, it is true, flourished before the intro- 
duction of romances of chivalry; but the legends of 
their prowess have been multiplied beyond bounds, in 
consequence of the taste created by these romances, 
and an easy faith accorded to them at the same time, 
such as would never have been conceded in any other 
civilized nation. In short, the elements of truth and 
falsehood became so blended that history was converted 
into romance, and romance received the credit due 
only to history. 

These mischievous consequences drew down the an- 
imadversions of thinking men, and at length provoked 
the interference of government itself. In 1543, Charles 
the Fifth, by an edict, prohibited books of chivalry 
from being imported into his American colonies, or 
being printed or even read there. The legislation for 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



143 



America proceeded from the crown alone, which had 
always regarded the New World as its own exclusive 
property. In 1555, however, the Cortes of the king- 
dom presented a petition (which requires only the royal 
signature to become at once the law), setting forth the 
manifold evils resulting from these romances. There 
is an air at once both of simplicity and solemnity in 
the language of this instrument which may amuse the 
reader: "Moreover, we say that it is very notorious 
what mischief has been done to young men and maid- 
ens, and other persons, by the perusal of books full of 
lies and vanities, like Amadis, and works of that de- 
scription, since young people especially, from their 
natural idleness, resort to this kind of reading, and, 
becoming enamored of passages of love or arms, or 
other nonsense which they find set forth therein, when 
situations at all analogous offer, are led to act much 
more extravagantly than they otherwise would have 
done. And many times the daughter, when her mother 
has locked her up safely at home, amuses herself with 
reading these books, which do her more hurt than she 
would have received from going abroad. All which 
redounds not only to the dishonor of individuals, 
but to the great detriment of conscience, by divert- 
ing the affections from holy, true, and Christian doc- 
trine, to those wicked vanities with which the wits, 
as we have intimated, are completely bewildered. To 
remedy this, we entreat your majesty that no book 
treating of such matters be henceforth permitted 
to be read, that those now printed be collected and 
burned, and that none be published hereafter without 
special license ; by which measures your majesty will 



i 4 4 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

render great service to God as well as to these king- 
doms," etc., etc. 

Notwithstanding this emphatic expression of public 
disapprobation, these enticing works maintained their 
popularity. The emperor Charles, unmindful of his 
own interdict, took great satisfaction in their perusal. 
The royal fetes frequently commemorated the fabulous 
exploits of chivalry, and Philip the Second, then a 
young man, appeared in these spectacles in the charac- 
ter of an adventurous knight-errant. Moratin enumer- 
ates more than seventy bulky romances, all produced 
in the sixteenth century, some of which passed through 
several editions, while many more works of the kind 
have, doubtless, escaped his researches. The last on 
his catalogue was printed in 1602, and was composed 
by one of the nobles at the court. Such was the state 
of things when Cervantes gave to the world the First 
Part of his Don Quixote; and it was against preju- 
dices which had so long bade defiance to public opinion 
and the law itself that he now aimed the delicate shafts 
of his irony. It was a perilous emprise. 

To effect his end, he did not produce a mere hu- 
morous travesty, like several of the Italian poets, who, 
having selected some well-known character in romance, 
make him fall into such low dialogue and such gross 
buffoonery as contrast most ridiculously with his as- 
sumed name; for this, though a very good jest in its 
way, was but a jest, and Cervantes wanted the biting 
edge of satire. He was, besides, too much of a poet — 
was too deeply penetrated with the true spirit of chiv- 
alry not to respect the noble qualities which were the 
basis of it. He shows this in the auto da fe of the 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



1 45 



Don's library, where he spares the Am ad is de Gaula 
and some others, the best of their kind. He had once 
himself, as he tells us, actually commenced a serious 
tale of chivalry. 

Cervantes brought forward a personage, therefore, 
in whom were embodied all those generous virtues 
which belong to chivalry: disinterestedness, contempt 
of danger, unblemished honor, knightly courtesy, and 
those aspirations after ideal excellence which, if empty 
dreams, are the dreams of a magnanimous spirit. They 
are, indeed, represented by Cervantes as too ethereal 
for this world, and are successively dispelled as they 
come in contact with the coarse realities of life. It is 
this view of the subject which has led Sismondi, among 
other critics, to consider that the principal end of the 
author was " the ridicule of enthusiasm, — the contrast 
of the heroic with the vulgar," — and he sees some- 
thing profoundly sad in the conclusions to which it 
leads. This sort of criticism appears to be over- 
refined. It resembles the efforts of some commenta- 
tors to allegorize the great epics of Homer and Virgil, 
throwing a disagreeable mistiness over the story by con- 
verting mere shadows into substances, and substances 
into shadows. 

The great purpose of Cervantes was, doubtless, that 
expressly avowed by himself, namely, to correct the 
popular taste for romances of chivalry. It is unneces- 
sary to look for any other in so plain a tale, although, 
it is true, the conduct of the story produces impres- 
sions on the reader, to a certain extent, like those 
suggested by Sismondi. The melancholy tendency, 
however, is in a great degree counteracted by the ex- 
g 13 



146 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

quisitely ludicrous character of the incidents. Per- 
haps, after all, if we are to hunt for a moral as the key 
of the fiction, we may with more reason pronounce it 
to be the necessity of proportioning our undertakings 
to our capacities. 

The mind of the hero, Don Quixote, is an ideal 
world, into which Cervantes has poured all the rich 
stores of his own imagination, the poet's golden 
dreams, high romantic exploit, and the sweet visions 
of pastoral happiness ; the gorgeous chimeras of the 
fancied age of chivalry, which had so long entranced 
the world ; splendid illusions, which, floating before 
us like the airy bubbles which the child throws off 
from his pipe, reflect, in a thousand variegated tints, 
the rude objects around, until, brought into collision 
with these, they are dashed in pieces and melt into 
air. These splendid images derive tenfold beauty from 
the rich, antique coloring of the author's language, 
skilfully imitated from the old romances, but which 
necessarily escapes in the translation into a foreign 
tongue. Don Quixote's insanity operates both in mis- 
taking the ideal for the real, and the real for the ideal. 
Whatever he has found in romances he believes to exist 
in the world; and he converts all he meets with in the 
world into the visions of his romances. It is difficult 
to say which of the two produces the most ludicrous 
results. 

For the better exposure of these mad fancies, Cer- 
vantes has not only put them into action in real life, 
but contrasted them with another character which may 
be said to form the reverse side of his hero's. Honest 
Sancho represents the material principle as perfectly as 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



147 



his master does the intellectual or ideal. He is of the 
earth, earthy. Sly, selfish, sensual, his dreams are not 
of glory, but of good feeding. His only concern is 
for his carcass. His notions of honor appear to be 
much the same with those of his jovial contemporary 
Falstaff, as conveyed in his memorable soliloquy. In 
the sublime night-piece which ends with the fulling- 
mills — truly sublime until we reach the denouement — 
Sancho asks his master, " Why need you go about this 
adventure ? It is main dark, and there is never a 
living soul sees us; we have nothing to do but to sheer 
off and get out of harm's way. Who is there to take 
notice of our flinching?" Can any thing be imagined 
more exquisitely opposed to the true spirit of chivalry? 
The whole compass of fiction nowhere displays the 
power of contrast so forcibly as in these two charac- 
ters : perfectly opposed to each other, not only in their 
minds and general habits, but in the minutest details 
of personal appearance. 

It was a great effort of art for Cervantes to maintain 
the dignity of his hero's character in the midst of the 
whimsical and ridiculous distresses in which he has 
perpetually involved him. His infirmity leads us to 
distinguish between his character and his conduct, and 
to absolve him from all responsibility for the latter. 
The author's art is no less shown in regard to the other 
principal figure in the piece, Sancho Panza, who, with 
the most- contemptible qualities, contrives to keep a 
strong hold on our interest by the kindness of his 
nature and his shrewd understanding. He is far too 
shrewd a person, indeed, to make it natural for him to 
have followed so crack-brained a master unless bribed 



148 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

by the promise of a substantial recompense. He is a 
personification, as it were, of the popular wisdom, — a 
"bundle of proverbs," as his master somewhere styles 
him ; and proverbs are the most compact form in 
which the wisdom of a people is digested. They have 
been collected into several distinct works in Spain, 
where they exceed in number those of any other, if 
not every other, country in Europe. As many of 
them are of great antiquity, they are of inestimable 
price with the Castilian purists, as affording rich sam- 
ples of obsolete idioms and the various mutations of 
the language. 

The subordinate portraits in the romance, though 
not wrought with the same care, are admirable studies 
of national character. In this view, the Don Quixote 
may be said to form an epoch in the history of letters, 
as the original of that kind of composition, the Novel 
of Character, which is one of the distinguishing pecu- 
liarities of modern literature. When well executed, 
this sort of writing rises to the dignity of history itself, 
and may be said to perform no insignificant part of 
the functions of the latter. History describes men 
less as they are than as they appear, as they are play- 
ing a part on the great political theatre, — men in mas- 
querade. It rests on state documents, which too often 
cloak real purposes under an artful veil of policy, or 
on the accounts of contemporaries blinded by passion 
or interest. Even without these deductions, the revo- 
lutions of states, their wars, and their intrigues do not 
present the only aspect, nor, perhaps, the most inter- 
esting, under which human nature can be studied. It 
is man in his domestic relations, around his own fire- 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



149 



side, where alone his real character can be truly dis- 
closed ; in his ordinary occupations in society, whether 
for purposes of profit or of pleasure ; in his every-day 
manner of living, his tastes and opinions, as drawn 
out in social intercourse \ it is, in short, under all those 
forms which make up the interior of society that man 
is to be studied, if we would get the true form and 
pressure of the age, — if, in short, we would obtain 
clear and correct ideas of the actual progress of civil- 
ization. 

But these topics do not fall within the scope of the 
historian. He cannot find authentic materials for 
them. They belong to the novelist, who, indeed, 
contrives his incidents and creates his characters, but 
who, if true to his art, animates them with the same 
tastes, sentiments, and motives of action which belong 
to the period of his fiction. His portrait is not the 
less true because no individual has sat for it. He has 
seized the physiognomy of the times. Who is there 
that does not derive a more distinct idea of the state 
of society and manners in Scotland from the Waverley 
novels than from the best of its historians ? of the 
condition of the Middle Ages from the single romance 
of Ivanhoe than from the volumes of Hume or Hal- 
lam? In like manner, the pencil of Cervantes has 
given a far more distinct and a richer portraiture of 
life in Spain in the sixteenth century than can be 
gathered from a library of monkish chronicles. 

Spain, which furnished the first good model of this 
kind of writing, seems to have possessed more ample 
materials for it than any other country except Eng- 
land. This is perhaps owing in a great degree to the 

13* 



150 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

freedom and originality of the popular character. It 
is the country where the lower classes make the near- 
est approach, in their conversation, to what is called 
humor. Many of the national proverbs are seasoned 
with it, as well as the picaresco tales, the indigenous 
growth of the soil, where, however, the humor runs 
rather too much to mere practical jokes. The free 
expansion of the popular characteristics may be traced, 
in part, to the freedom of the political institutions of the 
country before the iron hand of the Austrian dynasty 
was laid on it. The long wars with the Moslem in- 
vaders called every peasant into the field, and gave 
him a degree of personal consideration. In some of 
the provinces, as Catalonia, the democratic spirit fre- 
quently rose to an uncontrollable height. In this free 
atmosphere the rich and peculiar traits of national char- 
acter were unfolded. The territorial divisions which 
marked the Peninsula, broken up anciently into a num- 
ber of petty and independent states, gave, moreover, 
great variety to the national portraiture. The rude 
Asturian, the haughty and indolent Castilian, the 
industrious Aragonese, the independent Catalan, the 
jealous and wily Andalusian, the effeminate Valencian, 
and magnificent Granadine, furnished an infinite va- 
riety of character and costume for the study of the 
artist. The intermixture of Asiatic races to an extent 
unknown in any other European land was favorable to 
the same result. The Jews and the Moors were settled 
in too great numbers, and for too many centuries, in 
the land, not to have left traces of their Oriental civil- 
ization. The best blood of the country has flowed 
from what the modern Spaniard — the Spaniard of the 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



*5* 



Inquisition — regards as impure sources ; and a work, 
popular in the Peninsula, under the name of Tizon de 
Espana, or " Brand of Spain," maliciously traces back 
the pedigrees of the noblest houses in the kingdom to 
a Jewish or Morisco origin. All these circumstances 
have conspired to give a highly poetic interest to the 
character of the Spaniards ; to make them, in fact, the 
most picturesque of European nations, affording richer 
and far more various subjects for the novelist than 
other nations whose peculiarities have been kept down 
by the weight of a despotic government or the artificial 
and levelling laws of fashion. 

There is one other point of view in which the Don 
Quixote presents itself, that of its didactic import. It 
is not merely moral in its general tendency, though 
this was a rare virtue in the age in which it was 
written, but is replete with admonition and criticism, 
oftentimes requiring great boldness, as well as origi- 
nality, in the author. Such, for instance, are the de- 
rision of witchcraft, and other superstitions common to 
the Spaniards ; the ridicule of torture, which, though 
not used in the ordinary courts, was familiar to the 
Inquisition ; the frequent strictures on various depart- 
ments and productions of literature. The literary 
criticism scattered throughout the work shows a pro- 
found acquaintance with the true principles of taste far 
before his time, and which has left his judgments of 
the writings of his countrymen still of paramount 
authority. In truth, the great scope of his work was 
didactic, for it was a satire against the false taste of 
his age. And never was there a satire so completely 
successful. The last romance of chivalry, before the 



i5 2 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



appearance of the Don Quixote, came out in 1602. 
It was the last that was ever published in Spain. So 
completely was this kind of writing, which had bade 
defiance to every serious effort, now extinguished by 
the breath of ridicule, 

" That soft and summer breath, whose subtile power 
Passes the strength of storms in their most desolate hour." 

It was impossible for any new author to gain an audi- 
ence. The public had seen how the thunder was fab- 
ricated. The spectator had been behind the scenes, 
and witnessed of what cheap materials kings and 
queens were made. It was impossible for him, by 
any stretch of imagination, to convert the tinsel and 
painted baubles which he had seen there into diadems 
and sceptres. The illusion had fled forever. 

Satire seldom survives the local or temporary inter- 
ests against which it is directed. It loses its life with 
its sting. The satire of Cervantes is an exception. 
The objects at which it was aimed have long since 
ceased to interest. The modern reader is attracted to 
the book simply by its execution as a work of art, 
and, from want of previous knowledge, comprehends 
few of the allusions which gave such infinite zest to 
the perusal in its own day. Yet, under all these dis- 
advantages, it not only maintains its popularity, but 
is far more widely extended, and enjoys far higher con- 
sideration, than in the life of its author. Such are 
the triumphs of genius ! 

Cervantes correctly appreciated his own work. He 
more than once predicted its popularity. "I will lay 
a wager," says Sancho, "that before long there will 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



*53 



not be a chop-house, tavern, or barber's stall but will 
have a painting of our achievements." The honest 
squire's prediction was verified in his own day; and 
the author might have seen paintings of his work on 
wood and on canvas, as well as copper-plate engrav- 
ings of it. Besides several editions of it at home, it 
was printed, in his own time, in Portugal, Flanders, 
and Italy. Since that period, it has passed into num- 
berless editions both in Spain and other countries. It 
has been translated into nearly every European tongue 
over and over again ; into English ten times, into 
French eight, and others less frequently. We will 
close the present notice with a brief view of some of 
the principal editions, together with that at the head 
of our article. 

The currency of the romance among all classes fre- 
quently invited its publication by incompetent hands ; 
and the consequence was a plentiful crop of errors, 
until the original text was nearly despoiled of its 
beauty, while some passages were omitted, and foreign 
ones still more shamefully interpolated. The first 
attempt to retrieve the original from these harpies, 
who thus foully violated it, singularly enough, was 
made in England. Queen Caroline, the wife of George 
the Second, had formed a collection of books of ro- 
mance, which she playfully named the "library of the 
sage Merlin." The romance of Cervantes alone was 
wanting; and a nobleman, Lord Carteret, undertook 
to provide her with a suitable copy at his own expense. 
This was the origin of the celebrated edition published 
by Tonson, in London, 1738, 4 torn. 4to. It con- 
tained the Life of the Author, written for it by the 
g* . 



*54 



BIOGRAPHICAL A AW 



learned Mayans y Siscar. It was the first biography 
(which merits the name) of Cervantes ; and it shows 
into what oblivion his personal history had already 
fallen, that no less than seven towns claimed each the 
honor of giving him birth. The fate of Cervantes 
resembled that of Homer. 

The example thus set by foreigners excited an hon- 
orable emulation at home; and at length, in 1780, a 
magnificent edition, from the far-famed press of Ibarra, 
was published at Madrid, in 4 torn. 4to, under the aus- 
pices of the Royal Spanish Academy ; which, unlike 
many other literary bodies of sounding name, has con- 
tributed most essentially to the advancement of letters, 
not merely by original memoirs, but by learned and 
very beautiful editions of ancient writers. Its Don 
Quixote exhibits a most careful revision of the text, 
collated from the several copies printed in the author's 
lifetime and supposed to have received his own emen- 
dations. There is too good reason to believe that these 
corrections were made with a careless hand ; at all 
events, there is a plentiful harvest of typographical 
blunders in these primitive editions. 

Prefixed to the publication of the Academy is the 
Life of Cervantes, by Rios, written with uncommon 
elegance, and containing nearly all that is of much 
interest in his personal history. A copious analysis 
of the romance follows, in which a parallel is closely 
elaborated between it and the poems of Homer. But 
the romantic and the classical differ too widely from 
each other to admit of such an approximation ; and 
the method of proceeding necessarily involves its 
author in infinite absurdities, which show an entire 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



*55 



ignorance of the true principles of philosophical criti- 
cism, and which he would scarcely have fallen into 
had he given heed to the maxims of Cervantes himself. 

In the following year, 1781, there appeared another 
edition in England deserving of particular notice. It 
was prepared by the Rev. Mr. Bowie, a clergyman at 
Idemestone, who was so enamored of the romance of 
Cervantes that, after collecting a library of such works 
as could any way illustrate his author, he spent four- 
teen years in preparing a suitable commentary on him. 
There was ample scope for such a commentary. Many 
of the satirical allusions of the romance were misun- 
derstood, as we have said, owing to ignorance of the 
books of chivalry at which they were aimed. Many 
incidents and usages, familiar to the age of Cervantes, 
had long since fallen into oblivion ; and much of the 
idiomatic phraseology had grown to be obsolete, and 
required explanation. Cervantes himself had fallen 
into some egregious blunders, which in his subsequent 
revision of the work he had neglected to set right. 
The reader will readily call to mind the confusion as 
to Sancho's Dapple, who appears and disappears, most 
unaccountably, on the scene, according as the author 
happens to remember or forget that he was stolen. 
He afterwards corrected this in two or three instances, 
but left three or four others unheeded. To the same 
account must be charged numberless gross anachron- 
isms. Indeed, the whole Second Part is an anachron- 
ism, since the author introduces his hero criticising his 
First Part, in which his own epitaph is recorded. 

Cervantes seems to have had a great distaste for the 
work of revision. Some of his blunders he laid at the 



156 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



printer's door, and others he dismissed with the re- 
mark, more ingenious than true, that they were like 
moles, which, though blemishes in themselves, add to 
the beauty of the countenance. He little dreamed 
that his lapses were to be watched so narrowly, that a 
catalogue was actually to be set down of all his repe- 
titions and inconsistencies, and that each of his hero's 
sallies was to be adjusted by an accurate chronological 
table like any real history. He would have been still 
slower to believe that in the middle of the eighteenth 
century a learned society, the Academy of Literature 
and Fine Arts at Troyes, in Champagne, should have 
chosen a deputation of their body to visit Spain and 
examine the library of the Escurial, in order to obtain, 
if possible, the original MS. of that Arabian sage from 
whom Cervantes professed to have translated his ro- 
mance. This was to be more mad than Don Quixote 
himself; yet this actually happened. 

Bowie's edition was printed in six volumes quarto; 
the two last contained notes, illustrations, and index, 
all, as well as the text, in Castilian. Watt, in his 
laborious " Bibliotheca Britannica," remarks that the 
book did not come up to the public expectation. If 
so, the public must have been very unreasonable. It 
was a marvellous achievement for a foreigner. It was 
the first attempt at a commentary on the Quixote, 
and, although doubtless exhibiting inaccuracies which 
a native might have escaped, has been a rich mine 
of illustration, from which native critics have helped 
themselves most liberally, and sometimes with scanty 
ackno wledgme n t . 

The example of the English critic led to similar 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



157 



labors in Spain, among the most successful of which 
may be mentioned the edition by Pellicer, which has 
commended itself to every scholar by its very learned 
disquisitions on many topics both of history and criti- 
cism. It also contains a valuable memoir of Cervantes, 
whose life has since been written, in a manner which 
leaves nothing farther to be desired, by Navarrete, well 
known by his laborious publication of documents rela- 
tive to the early Spanish discoveries. His biography 
of the novelist comprehends all the information, direct 
and subsidiary, which can now be brought together for 
the elucidation of his personal or literary history. If 
Cervantes, like his great contemporary, Shakspeare, 
has left few authentic details of his existence, the de- 
ficiency has been diligently supplied in both cases by 
speculation and conjecture. 

There was still wanting a classical commentary on 
the Quixote devoted to the literary execution of the 
work. Such a commentary has at length appeared 
from the pen of Clemencin, the accomplished secretary 
of the Spanish Academy of History, who had acquired 
a high reputation for himself by the publication of the 
sixth volume of its memoirs, the exclusive work of his 
own hand. In his edition of the romance, besides 
illuminating with rare learning many of the obscure 
points in the narrative, he has accompanied the text 
with a severe but enlightened criticism, which, while 
it boldly exposes occasional offences against taste or 
grammar, directs the eye to those latent beauties which 
might escape a rapid or an ordinary reader. We much 
doubt if any Castilian classic has been so ably illus- 
trated. Unfortunately, the First Part only was com- 

14 



158 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

pleted by the commentator, who died very recently. 
It will not be easy to find a critic equally qualified by 
his taste and erudition for the completion of the work. 

The English, as we have noticed, have evinced their 
relish for Cervantes not only by their critical labors 
but by repeated translations. Some of these are exe- 
cuted with much skill, considering the difficulty of 
correctly rendering the idiomatic phraseology of hu- 
morous dialogue. The most popular versions are those 
of Motteux, Jarvis, and Smollett. Perhaps the first is 
the best of all. It was by a Frenchman, who came 
over to England in the time of James the Second. It 
betrays nothing of its foreign parentage, however, 
while its rich and racy diction and its quaint turns of 
expression are admirably suited to convey a lively and 
very faithful image of the original. The slight tinge 
of antiquity which belongs to the time is not displeas- 
ing, and comports well with the tone of knightly dig- 
nity which distinguishes the hero. Lockhart's notes 
and poetical versions of old Castilian ballads, appended 
to the recent edition of Motteux, have rendered it 
by far the most desirable translation. It is singular 
that the first classical edition of Don Quixote, the first 
commentary, and probably the best foreign trans- 
lation should have been all produced in England ; 
and, farther, that the English commentator should 
have written in Spanish, and the English translation 
have been by a Frenchman. 

We now come to Mr. Sales' s recent edition of the 
original, the first, probably, which has appeared in the 
New World, of the one-half of which the Spanish is 
the spoken language. There was great need of some 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 159 

uniform edition to meet the wants of our University, 
where much inconvenience has been long experienced 
from the discrepancies of the copies used. The only- 
ones to be procured in this country are contemptible 
both in regard to printing and paper, and are defaced 
by the grossest errors. They are the careless manu- 
facture of ill-informed Spanish booksellers, made to 
sell, and dear to boot. 

Mr. Sales has adopted a right plan for remedying 
these several evils. He has carefully formed his text 
on that of the last and most correct edition of the 
Academy, and, as he has stereotyped the work, any 
verbal errors may be easily rectified. The Academy 
has substituted the modern orthography for that of 
Cervantes, who, independently of the change which has 
gradually taken place in the language, seems to have 
had no uniform system himself. Mr. Sales has con- 
formed to the rules prescribed by this high authority 
for regulating his orthography, accent, and punctua- 
tion. In some instances, only, he has adopted the an- 
cient usage in beginning words with/" instead of h, and 
retaining obsolete terminations of verbs, as hablades 
for hablais, hablabades for hablabais, amades for amais, 
amabades for amabais, etc., no doubt as better suited 
to the lofty tone of the good knight's discourses, who 
himself affected a reverence for the antique in his 
conversation to which his translators have not always 
sufficiently attended. . 

In one respect the present editor has made some 
alterations not before attempted, we believe, in the text 
of his original. We have already noticed the inaccu- 
racies of the early copies of the Don Quixote, partly 



160 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

imputable to Cervantes himself, and in a greater de- 
gree, doubtless, to his printers. There is no way of 
rectifying such errors by collation with the author's 
manuscript, which has long since disappeared. All 
that can now be done, therefore, is to point out the 
purer reading in a note, as Clemencin, Arrieta, and 
other commentators have done, or, as Mr. Sales has 
preferred, to introduce it into the body of the text. 
We will give one or two specimens of these alterations : 

" Poco mas 6 menos." — Tom. i. p. 141. 

The reading in the old editions is "poco mas a me- 
nos," a phrase as unintelligible in Spanish now as its 
literal translation would be in English, although in 
use, it would seem from other authorities, in the age 
of Cervantes. 

" Por tales os juzgue y tuve." — Tom. i. p. 104. 

The old editions add "siempre," which clearly is in- 
correct, since Don Quixote is speaking of the present 
occasion. 

" Don Quijote quedo admirado." — Tom. i. p. 143. 

Other editions read "El dial quedo," etc. The use 
of the relative leaves the reader in doubt who is in- 
tended, and Mr. Sales, in conformity to Clemencin's 
suggestion, has made the sentence clear by substituting 
the name of the knight. 

" Donde les sucediero?i cosas," etc. — Tom. ii. p. 44. 

In other editions, " sucedib ;" bad grammar, since it 
agrees with a plural noun. 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. j6i 

" En tan poco espacio de tiempo como ha que estuvo 
alia," etc. (torn. ii. p. 132), instead of " estd alia," 
clearly the wrong tense, since the verb refers to past 
time. 

It is unnecessary to multiply examples, a sufficient 
number of which have been cited to show on what 
principles the emendations have been made. They 
have been confined to the correction of such violations 
of grammar, or such inaccuracies of expression, as 
obscure or distort the meaning. They have been made 
with great circumspection, and in obedience to the 
suggestion of the highest authorities in the language. 
For the critical scholar, who would naturally prefer the 
primitive text with all its impurities, they were not 
designed. But they are of infinite value to the gen- 
eral reader and the student, who may now read this 
beautiful classic purified from those verbal blemishes 
which, however obvious to a native, could not fail to 
mislead a foreigner. 

Besides these emendations, Mr. Sales has illustrated 
the work by prefixing to it the admirable preliminary 
discourse of Clemencin, and by a considerable body of 
notes, selected and abridged from the most approved 
commentators ; and, as the object has been to explain 
the text to the reader, not to involve him in antiqua- 
rian or critical disquisitions, when his authorities have 
failed to do this the editor has supplied notes of his 
own, throwing much light on matters least familiar to 
a foreigner. In this part of his work we think he 
might have derived considerable aid from Bowie, whom 
he does not appear to have consulted. The Castilian 
commentator Arrieta, whom he liberally uses, is largely 

14* 



1 62 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

indebted to the English critic, who, as a foreigner, 
moreover, has been led into many seasonable explana- 
tions that would be superfluous to a Spaniard. 

We may notice another peculiarity in the present 
edition, that of breaking up the text into reasonable 
paragraphs, in imitation of the English translations ; 
a great relief to the spirits of the reader, which are 
seriously damped, in the ancient copies, by the in- 
terminable waste of page upon page, without these 
convenient halting-places. 

But ourreaders, we fear, will think we are running 
into an interminable waste of discussion. We will 
only remark, therefore, in conclusion, that the me- 
chanical execution of the book is highly creditable to 
our press. It is, moreover, adorned with etchings by 
our American Cruikshank, Johnston, — some of them 
original, but mostly copies from the late English edi- 
tion of Smollett's translations. They are designed and 
executed with much spirit, and, no doubt, would have 
fully satisfied honest Sancho, who predicted this kind 
of immortality for himself and his master. 

We congratulate the public on the possession of an 
edition of the pride of Castilian literature from our 
own press in so neat a form and executed with so much 
correctness and judgment; and we trust that the am- 
bition of its respectable editor will be gratified by its 
becoming, as it well deserves to be, the manual of the 
student in every seminary throughout the country where 
the noble Castilian language is taught. 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 163 



SIR WALTER SCOTT.* 

(April, 1838.) 

There is no kind of writing, which has truth and 
instruction for its main object, so interesting and pop- 
ular, on the whole, as biography. History, in its larger 
sense, has to deal with masses, which, while they di- 
vide the attention by the dazzling variety of objects, 
from their very generality are scarcely capable of 
touching the heart. The great objects on which it is 
employed have little relation to the daily occupations 
with which the reader is most intimate. A nation, 
like a corporation, seems to have no soul, and its 
checkered vicissitudes may be contemplated rather 
with curiosity for the lessons they convey than with 
personal sympathy. How different are the feelings 
excited by the fortunes of an individual, — one of the 
mighty mass, who in the page of history is swept along 
the current unnoticed and unknown ! Instead of a 
mere abstraction, at once we see a being like ourselves, 
"fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, 
subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, 
warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer" 

* 1. "Memoirs of the Life of Sir. Walter Scott, Bart., by J. G. 
Lockhart. Five vols. 121110. Boston: Otis, Broaders & Co., 1837." 

2. "Recollections of Sir Walter Scott, Bart., i6mo. London: 
James Fraser, 1837." 



1 64 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

as we are. We place ourselves in his position, and 
see the passing current of events with the same eyes. 
We become a party to all his little schemes, share in 
his triumphs, or mourn with him in the disappoint- 
ment of defeat. His friends become our friends. We 
learn to take an interest in their characters from their 
relation to him. As they pass away from the stage 
one after another, and as the clouds of misfortune, 
perhaps, or of disease, settle around the evening of his 
own day, we feel the same sadness that steals over us 
on a retrospect of earlier and happier hours. And 
when at last we have followed him to the tomb, we 
close the volume, and feel that we have turned over 
another chapter in the history of life. 

On the same principles, probably, we are more 
moved by the exhibition of those characters whose 
days have been passed in the ordinary routine of do- 
mestic and social life than by those most intimately 
connected with the great public events of their age. 
What, indeed, is the history of such men but that of 
the times? The life of Wellington or of Bonaparte is 
the- story of the wars and revolutions of Europe. But 
that of Cowper, gliding away in the seclusion of rural 
solitude, reflects all those domestic joys, and, alas ! 
more than the sorrows, which gather around every 
man's fireside and his heart. In this way the story of 
the humblest individual, faithfully recorded, becomes 
an object of lively interest. How much is that in- 
terest increased m the case of a man like Scott, who, 
from his own fireside, has sent forth a voice to cheer 
and delight millions of his fellow-men, — whose life was 
passed within the narrow circle of his own village, as 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 165 

it were, but who, nevertheless, has called up more 
shapes and fantasies within that magic circle, acted 
more extraordinary parts, and afforded more marvels 
for the imagination to feed on, than can be furnished 
by the most nimble-footed, nimble-tongued traveller, 
from Marco Polo down to Mrs. Trollope, and that 
literary Sinbad, Captain Hall. 

Fortunate as Sir Walter Scott was in his life, it is 
not the least of his good fortunes that he left the task 
of recording it to one so competent as Mr. Lockhart, 
who to a familiarity with the person and habits of his 
illustrious subject unites such entire sympathy with his 
pursuits and such fine tact and discrimination in ar- 
ranging the materials for their illustration. We have 
seen it objected that the biographer has somewhat 
transcended his lawful limits in occasionally exposing 
what a nice tenderness for the reputation of Scott 
should have led him to conceal ; but, on reflection, we 
are not inclined to adopt these views. It is difficult to 
prescribe any precise rule by which the biographer 
should be guided in exhibiting the peculiarities, and, 
still more, the defects, of his subject. He should, 
doubtless, be slow to draw from obscurity those mat- 
ters which are of a strictly personal and private nature, 
particularly when they have no material bearing on the 
character of the individual. But whatever the latter 
has done, said, or written to others can rarely be made 
to come within this rule. A swell of panegyric, where 
every thing is in broad sunshine, without the relief of a 
shadow to contrast it, is out of nature, and must bring 
discredit on the whole. Nor is it much better when 
a sort of twilight mystification is spread over a man's 



1 66 BIOGRAPHICAL AA'D 

actions, until, as in the case of all biographies of 
Cowper previous to that of Southey, we are completely 
bewildered respecting the real motives of conduct. If 
ever there was a character above the necessity of any 
management of this sort, it was Scott's; and we can- 
not but think that the frank exposition of the minor 
blemishes which sully it, by securing the confidence of 
the reader in the general fidelity of the portraiture, 
and thus disposing him to receive without distrust 
those favorable statements in his history which might 
seem incredible, as they certainly are unprecedented, 
is, on the whole, advantageous to his reputation. As 
regards the moral effect on the reader, we may apply 
Scott's own argument for not always recompensing 
suffering virtue, at the close of his fictions, with tem- 
poral prosperity, — that such an arrangement would 
convey no moral to the heart whatever, since a glance 
at the great picture of life would show that virtue is 
not always thus rewarded. 

In regard to the literary execution of Mr. Lockhart's 
work, the public voice has long since pronounced on 
it. A prying criticism may discern a few of those 
contraband epithets and slipshod sentences, more ex- 
cusable in young "Peter's Letters to his Kinsfolk," 
where, indeed, they are thickly sown, than in the pro- 
duction of a grave Aristarch of British criticism. But 
this is small game, where every reader of the least 
taste and sensibility must find so much to applaud. 
It is enough to say that in passing from the letters 
of Scott, with which the work is enriched, to the 
text of the biographer, we find none of those chilling 
transitions which occur on the like occasions in more 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 167 

bungling productions; as, for example, in that recent 
one in which the unfortunate Hannah More is done 
to death by her friend Roberts. On the contrary, we 
are sensible only to a new variety of beauty in the style 
of composition. The correspondence is illumined by 
all that is needed to make it intelligible to a stranger, 
and selected with such discernment as to produce the 
clearest impression of the character of its author. The 
mass of interesting details is conveyed in language 
richly colored with poetic sentiment, and, at the same 
time, without a tinge of that mysticism which, as Scott 
himself truly remarked, " will never do for a writer of 
fiction, no, nor of history, nor moral essays, nor ser- 
mons," but which, nevertheless, finds more or less 
favor in our own community, at the present day, in 
each and all of these. 

The second work which we have placed at the head 
of this article, and from which the last remark of Sir 
Walter's was borrowed, is a series of notices originally 
published in " Fraser's Magazine," but now collected, 
with considerable additions, into a separate volume. 
Its author, Mr. Robert Pierce Gillies, is a gentleman 
of the Scotch bar, favorably known by translations 
from the German. The work conveys a lively report 
of several scenes and events which before the appear- 
ance of Lockhart's book were of more interest and 
importance than they can now be, lost as they are in 
the flood of light which is poured on us from that 
source. In the absence of the sixth and last volume, 
however, Mr. Gillies may help us to a few particulars 
respecting the closing years of Sir Walter's life, that 
may have some novelty — we know not how much to 



1 68 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

be relied on — for the reader. In the present notice 
of a work so familiar to most persons, we shall confine 
ourselves to some of those circumstances which con- 
tribute to form, or have an obvious connection with, 
his literary character. 

Walter Scott was born at Edinburgh, August 15th, 
1 771. The character of his father, a respectable mem- 
ber of that class of attorneys who in Scotland are 
called Writers to the Signet, is best conveyed to the 
reader by saying that he sat for the portrait of Mr. 
Saunders Fairford in " Redgauntlet." His mother 
was a woman of taste and imagination, and had an 
obvious influence in guiding those of her son. His 
ancestors, by both father's and mother's side, were of 
"gentle blood," a position which, placed between the 
highest and the lower ranks in society, was extremely 
favorable, as affording facilities for communication 
with both. A lameness in his infancy, — a most fortu- 
nate lameness for the world, if, as Scott says, it spoiled 
a soldier, — and a delicate constitution, made it expe- 
dient to try the efficacy of country air and diet, and 
he was placed under the roof of his paternal grand- 
father at Sandy-Knowe, a few miles distant from the 
capital. Here his days were passed in the open fields, 
"with no other fellowship," as he says, "than that of 
the sheep and lambs;" and here, in the lap of Nature, 

" Meet nurse for a poetic child," 

his infant vision was greeted with those rude, romantic 
scenes which his own verses have since hallowed for 
the pilgrims from every clime. In the long even- 
ings, his imagination, as he grew older, was warmed by 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 1 6g 

traditionary legends of border heroism and adventure, 
repeated by the aged relative, who had herself witnessed 
the last gleams of border chivalry. His memory was 
one of the first powers of his mind which exhibited an 
extraordinary development. One of the longest of 
these old ballads, in particular, stuck so close to it, and 
he repeated it with such stentorian vociferation, as to 
draw from the minister of a neighboring kirk the testy 
exclamation, "One may as well speak in the mouth of 
a cannon as where that child is. ' ' 

On his removal to Edinburgh, in his eighth year, 
he was subjected to different influences. His worthy 
father was a severe martinet in all the forms of his pro- 
fession, and, it may be added, of his religion, which 
he contrived to make somewhat burdensome to his 
more volatile son. The tutor was still more strict in 
his religious sentiments, and the lightest literary di- 
version in which either of them indulged was such 
as could be gleaned from the time-honored folios of 
Archbishop Spottiswoode or worthy Robert Wodrow. 
Even here, however, Scott's young mind contrived to 
gather materials and impulses for future action. In 
his long arguments with Master Mitchell, he became 
steeped in the history of the Covenanters and the per- 
secuted Church of Scotland, while he was still more 
rooted in his own Jacobite notions, early instilled into 
his mind by the tales of his relatives of Sandy-Knowe, 
whose own family had been out in the "affair of forty- 
five." Amid the professional and polemical worthies 
of his father's library, Scott detected a copy of Shak- 
speare, and he relates with what gout he used to creep 
out of his bed, where he had been safely deposited for 
h 15 



170 BIOGRAPHICAL AXD 

the night, and, by the light of the fire, in puris natu- 
ralibus, pore over the pages of the great magician, and 
study those mighty spells by which he gave to airy 
fantasies the forms and substance of humanity. Scott 
distinctly recollected the time and the spot where he 
first opened a volume of Percy's "Reliques of English 
Poetry;" a work which may have suggested to him 
the plan and the purpose of the "Border Minstrelsy." 
Every day's experience shows how much more actively 
the business of education goes on out of school than 
in it; and Scott's history shows equally that genius, 
whatever obstacles may be thrown in its way in one 
direction, will find room for its expansion in another, 
as the young tree sends forth its shoots most prolific 
in that quarter where the sunshine is permitted to fall 
on it. 

At the High School, in which he was placed by 
his father at an early period, he seems not to have 
been particularly distinguished in the regular course 
of studies. His voracious appetite for books, how- 
ever, of a certain cast, as romances, chivalrous tales, 
and worm-eaten chronicles scarcely less chivalrous, 
and his wonderful memory for such reading as struck 
his fancy, soon made him regarded by his fellows as 
a phenomenon of black-letter scholarship, which, in 
process of time, achieved for him the cognomen of 
that redoubtable schoolman, Duns Scotus. He now 
also gave evidence of his powers of creation as well as 
of acquisition. He became noted for his own stories, 
generally bordering on the marvellous, with a plen- 
tiful seasoning of knight-errantry, which suited his 
bold and chivalrous temper. "Slink over beside 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



171 



me, Jamie," he would whisper to his school-fellow 
Ballantyne, "and I'll tell you a story." Jamie was, 
indeed, destined to sit beside him during the greater 
part of his life. 

The same tastes and talents continued to display 
themselves more strongly with increasing years. Hav- 
ing beaten pretty thoroughly the ground of romantic 
and legendary lore, at least so far as the English libra- 
ries to which he had access would permit, he next 
endeavored, while at the University, to which he had 
been transferred from the High School, to pursue the 
same subject in the Continental languages. Many 
were the strolls which he took in the neighborhood, 
especially to Arthur's Seat and Salisbury Crags, where, 
perched on some almost inaccessible eyry, he might be 
seen conning over his Ariosto or Cervantes, or some 
other bard of romance, with some favorite companion 
of his studies, or pouring into the ears of the latter 
his own boyish legends, glowing with 

" achievements high, 
And circumstance of chivalry." 

A critical knowledge of these languages he seems 
not to have obtained, and even in the French made 
but an indifferent figure in conversation. An accurate 
acquaintance with the pronunciation and prosody of a 
foreign tongue is undoubtedly a desirable accomplish- 
ment ; but it is, after all, a mere accomplishment, sub- 
ordinate to the great purposes for which a language 
is to be learned. Scott did not, as is too often the 
case, mistake the shell for the kernel. He looked on 
language only as the key to unlock the foreign stores 



172 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



of wisdom, the pearls of inestimable price, wherever 
found, with which to enrich his native literature. 

After a brief residence at the University, he was 
regularly indented as an apprentice to his father in 
1786. One can hardly imagine a situation less con- 
genial with the ardent, effervescing spirit of a poetic 
fancy, fettered down to a daily routine of drudgery 
scarcely above that of a mere scrivener. It proved, 
however, a useful school of discipline to him. It 
formed early habits of method, punctuality, and labo- 
rious industry, — business habits, in short, most adverse 
to the poetic temperament, but indispensable to the 
accomplishment of the gigantic tasks which he after- 
wards assumed. He has himself borne testimony to 
his general diligence in his new vocation, and tells 
us that on one occasion he transcribed no less than 
a hundred and twenty folio pages at a sitting. 

In the midst of these mechanical duties, he did not 
lose sight of the favorite objects of his study and 
meditation. He made frequent excursions into the 
Lowland as well as Highland districts in search of 
traditionary relics. These pilgrimages he frequently 
performed on foot. His constitution, now become 
hardy by severe training, made him careless of ex- 
posure, and his frank and warm-hearted manners — 
eminently favorable to his purposes, by thawing at 
once any feelings of frosty reserve which might have 
encountered a stranger — made him equally welcome 
at the staid and decorous manse and at the rough 
but hospitable board of the peasant. Here was, in- 
deed, the study of the future novelist, the very school 
in which to meditate those models of character and 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



173 



situation which he was afterwards, long afterwards, to 
transfer, in such living colors, to the canvas. " He 
was makin' himsel a' the time," says one of his com- 
panions, "but he didna ken, maybe, what he was 
about till years had passed. At first he thought o' 
little, I dare say, but the queerness and the fun." 
The honest writer to the signet does not seem to have 
thought it either so funny or so profitable; for on his 
son's return from one of these raids, as he styled them, 
the old gentleman peevishly inquired how he had been 
living so long. "Pretty much like the young ravens," 
answered Walter: "I only wished I had been as good 
a player on the flute as poor George Primrose in the 
Vicar of Wakefield. If I had his art, I should like 
nothing better than to tramp like him from cottage to 
cottage over the world." "I doubt," said the grave 
clerk to the signet, "I greatly doubt, sir, you were 
born for nae better than a gangrel scrapegut /' ' Per- 
haps even the revelation, could it have been made to 
him, of his son's future literary glory, would scarcely 
have satisfied the worthy father, who probably would 
have regarded a seat on the bench of the Court of Ses- 
sions as much higher glory. At all events, this was 
not far from the judgment of Dominie Mitchell, who, 
in his notice of his illustrious pupil, "sincerely regrets 
that Sir Walter's precious time was devoted to the 
fluke rather than the utile of composition, and that 
his great talents should have been wasted on such 
subjects" ! 

It is impossible to glance at Scott's early life with- 
out perceiving how powerfully all its circumstances, 
whether accidental or contrived, conspired to train 

15* 



174 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

him for the peculiar position he was destined to occupy 
in the world of letters. There never was a character 
in whose infant germ the mature and fully-developed 
lineaments might be more distinctly traced. What he 
was in his riper age, so he was in his boyhood. We 
discern the same tastes, the same peculiar talents, the 
same social temper and affections, and, in a great de- 
gree, the same habits, — in their embryo state, of course, 
but distinctly marked ; and his biographer has shown 
no little skill in enabling us to trace their gradual, pro- 
gressive expansion from the hour of his birth up to the 
full prime and maturity of manhood. 

In 1792, Scott, whose original destination of a writer 
had been changed to that of an advocate, — from his 
father's conviction, as it would seem, of the superiority 
of his talents to the former station, — was admitted to 
the Scottish bar. Here he continued in assiduous 
attendance during the regular terms, but more noted 
for his stories in the Outer House than his arguments 
in court. It may appear singular that a person so 
gifted both as a writer and as a raconteur should have 
had no greater success in his profession. But the 
case is not uncommon. Indeed, experience shows that 
the most eminent writers have not made the most suc- 
cessful speakers. It is not more strange than that a 
good writer of novels should not excel as a dramatic 
author. Perhaps a consideration of the subject would 
lead us to refer the phenomena in both cases to the 
same principle. At all events, Scott was an exempli- 
fication of both, and we leave the solution to those 
who have more leisure and ingenuity to unravel the 
mystery. 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



175 



Scott's leisure, in the mean time, was well em- 
ployed in storing his mind with German romance, 
with whose wild fictions, intrenching on the grotesque, 
he found at that time more sympathy than in later 
life. In 1796 he first appeared before the public as 
a translator of Burger's well-known ballads, thrown 
off by him at a heat, and which found favor with the 
few into whose hands they passed. He subsequently 
adventured in Monk Lewis's crazy bark, " Tales of 
Wonder," which soon went to pieces, leaving, however, 
among its surviving fragments the scattered contribu- 
tions of Scott. 

At last, in 1802, he gave to the world his first two 
volumes of the "Border Minstrelsy," printed by his 
old school-fellow Ballantyne, and which, by the beauty 
of the typography, as well as literary execution, made 
an epoch in Scottish literary history. There was no 
work of Scott's after-life which showed the result of so 
much preliminary labor. Before ten years old, he had 
collected several volumes of ballads and traditions, and 
we have seen how diligently he pursued the same voca- 
tion in later years. The publication was admitted to 
be far more faithful, as well as skilfully collated, than 
its prototype, the " Reliques" of Bishop Percy; while 
his notes contained a mass of antiquarian information 
relative to border life, conveyed in a style of beauty 
unprecedented in topics of this kind, and enlivened 
with a higher interest than poetic fiction. Percy's 
"Reliques" had prepared the way for the kind recep- 
tion of the " Minstrelsy," by the general relish — not- 
withstanding Dr. Johnson's protest — it had created for 
the simple pictures of a pastoral and heroic time. 



176 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

Burns had since familiarized the English ear with the 
Doric melodies of his native land ; and now a greater 
than Burns appeared, whose first production, by a sin- 
gular chance, came into the world in the very year in 
which the Ayrshire minstrel was withdrawn from it, as 
if Nature had intended that the chain of poetic in- 
spiration should not be broken. The delight of the 
public was farther augmented on the appearance of the 
third volume of the " Minstrelsy," containing various 
imitations of the old ballad, which displayed the rich 
fashion of the antique, purified from the mould and 
rust by which the beauties of such weather-beaten 
trophies are defaced. 

The first edition of the "Minstrelsy," consisting of 
eight hundred copies, went off, as Lockhart tells us, in 
less than a year; and the poet, on the publication of 
a second, received five hundred pounds sterling from 
Longman, — an enormous price for such a commodity, 
but the best bargain, probably, that the bookseller ever 
made, as the subsequent sale has since extended to 
twenty thousand copies. 

Scott was not in great haste to follow up his success. 
It was three years later before he took the field as an 
independent author, in a poem which at once placed 
him among the great original writers of his country. 
The " Lay of the Last Minstrel," a complete expansion 
of the ancient ballad into an epic form, was published 
in 1805. It was opening a new creation in the realm 
of fancy. It seemed as if the author had transfused 
into his page the strong delineations of the Homeric 
pencil, the rude but generous gallantry of a primitive 
period, softened by the more airy and magical inven- 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



177 



tions of Italian romance,* and conveyed in tones of 
natural melody such as had not been heard since the 
strains of Burns. The book speedily found that un- 
precedented circulation which all his subsequent com- 
positions attained. Other writers had addressed them- 
selves to a more peculiar and limited feeling, — to a 
narrower and, generally, a more select audience. But 
Scott was found to combine all the qualities of interest 
for every order. He drew from the pure springs which 
gush forth in every heart. His narrative chained every 
reader's attention by the stirring variety of its inci- 
dents, while the fine touches of sentiment with which 
it abounded, like wild flowers springing up spontane- 
ously around, were full of freshness and beauty that 
made one wonder others should not have stooped to 
gather them before. 

The success of the "Lay" determined the course of 
its author's future life. Notwithstanding his punctual 
attention to his profession, his utmost profits for any 
one year of the ten he had been in practice had not 
exceeded two hundred and thirty pounds ; and of late 
they had sensibly declined. Latterly, indeed, he had 
coquetted somewhat too openly with the Muse for his 
professional reputation. Themis has always been found 

* " Mettendo lo Turpin, lo metto anch' io," 

says Ariosto, playfully, when he tells a particularly tough story. 

" I cannot tell how the truth may be, 
I say the tale as 'twas said to me," 

says the author of the " Lay" on a similar occasion. The resem- 
blance might be traced much farther than mere forms of expression, 
to the Italian, who, like 

" the Ariosto of the North, 
Sung ladye-love, and war, romance, and knightly worth." 
H* 



178 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

a stern and jealous mistress, chary of dispensing her 
golden favors to those who are seduced into a flirtation 
with her more volatile sister. 

Scott, however, soon found himself in a situation 
that made him independent of her favors. His income 
from the two offices to which he was promoted, of 
Sheriff of Selkirk, and Clerk of the Court of Sessions, 
was so ample, combined with what fell to him by in- 
heritance and marriage, that he was left at liberty 
freely to consult his own tastes. Amid the seductions 
of poetry, however, he never shrunk from his burden- 
some professional duties ; and he submitted to all their 
drudgery with unflinching constancy when the labors 
of his pen made the emoluments almost beneath con- 
sideration. He never relished the idea of being di- 
vorced from active life by the solitary occupations of a 
recluse. And his official functions, however severely 
they taxed his time, may be said to have in some de- 
gree compensated him by the new scenes of life which 
they were constantly disclosing, — the very materials of 
those fictions on which his fame and his fortune were 
to be built. 

Scott's situation was eminently propitious to literary 
pursuits. He was married, and passed the better por- 
tion of the year in the country, where the quiet pleas- 
ures of his fireside circle, and a keen relish for rural 
sports, relieved his mind and invigorated both health 
and spirits. In early life, it seems, he had been crossed 
in love ; and, like Dante and Byron, to whom in this 
respect he is often compared, he had more than once, 
according to his biographer, shadowed forth in his 
verses the object of his unfortunate passion. He does 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



179 



not appear to have taken it very seriously, however, 
nor to have shown the morbid sensibility in relation 
to it discovered by both Byron and Dante, whose stern 
and solitary natures were cast in a very different mould 
from the social temper of Scott. 

His next great poem was his " Marmion," tran- 
scending, in the judgment of many, all his other epics, 
and containing, in the judgment of all, passages of 
poetic fire which he never equalled, but which, never- 
theless, was greeted on its entrance into the world by 
a critique, in the leading journal of the day, of the 
most caustic and unfriendly temper. The journal 
was the Edinburgh, to which he had been a frequent 
contributor, and the reviewer was his intimate friend, 
Jeffrey. The unkindest cut in the article was the im- 
putation of a neglect of Scottish character and feeling. 
"There is scarcely one trait of true Scottish nation- 
ality or patriotism introduced into the whole poem; 
and Mr. Scott's only expression of admiration for the 
beautiful country to which he belongs is put, if we 
rightly remember, into the mouth of one of his Southern 
favorites." This of Walter Scott ! 

Scott was not slow, after this, in finding the political 
principles of the Edinburgh so repugnant to his own 
(and they certainly were as opposite as the poles) that 
he first dropped the journal, and next labored with 
unwearied diligence to organize another, whose main 
purpose should be to counteract the heresies of the 
former. This was the origin of the London Quar- 
terly, more imputable to Scott's exertions than to those 
of any, indeed all, other persons. The result has been, 
doubtless, highly serviceable to the interests of both 



i8o BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

morals and letters. Not that the new Review was con- 
ducted with more fairness, or, in this sense, principle, 
than its antagonist. A remark of Scott's own, in a 
letter to Ellis, shows with how much principle. "I 
have run up an attempt on ' The Curse of Kehama' for 
the Quarterly. It affords cruel openings to the quiz- 
zers, and I suppose will get it roundly in the Edinburgh 
Review. I would have made a very different hand 
of it, indeed, had the order of the day been pour 
declarer." But, although the fate of the individual 
was thus, to a certain extent, a matter of caprice, or, 
rather, prejudgment, in the critic, yet the great ab- 
stract questions in morals, politics, and literature, by 
being discussed on both sides, were presented in a 
fuller and, of course, fairer light to the public. An- 
other beneficial result to letters was — and we shall gain 
credit, at least, for candor in confessing it — that it 
broke down somewhat of that divinity which hedged 
in the despotic we of the reviewer so long as na rival 
arose to contest the sceptre. The claims to infalli- 
bility, so long and slavishly acquiesced in, fell to the 
ground when thus stoutly asserted by conflicting par- 
ties. It was pretty clear that the same thing could not 
be all black and all white at the same time. In short, 
it was the old story of pope and anti-pope ; and the 
public began to find out that there might be hopes 
for the salvation of an author though damned by the 
literary popedom. Time, by reversing many of its 
decisions, must at length have shown the same thing. 

But to return. Scott showed how nearly he had 
been touched to the quick by two other acts not so 
discreet. These were, the establishment of an Annual 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. igi 

Register, and of the great publishing house of the 
Ballantynes, in which he became a silent partner. The 
last step involved him in grievous embarrassments, and 
stimulated him to exertions which required "a frame 
of adamant and soul of fire." At the same time, 
we find him overwhelmed with poetical, biographical, 
historical, and critical compositions, together with 
editorial labors of appalling magnitude. In this mul- 
tiplication of himself in a thousand forms we see him 
always the same, vigorous and effective. "Poetry," 
he says in one of his letters, "is a scourging crop, 
and ought not to be hastily repeated. Editing, there- 
fore, may be considered as a green crop of turnips or 
pease, extremely useful to those whose circumstances 
do not admit of giving their farm a summer fallow." 
It might be regretted, however, that he should have 
wasted powers fitted for so much higher culture on the 
coarse products of a kitchen garden, which might have 
been safely trusted to inferior hands. 

In i8it, Scott gave to the world his exquisite poem, 
"The Lady of the Lake." One of his fair friends 
had remonstrated with him on thus risking again the 
laurel he had already won. He replied, with charac- 
teristic and, indeed, prophetic spirit, "If I fail, I will 
write prose all my life. But if I succeed, 

' Up wi' the bonnie blue bonnet, 
The dirk an' the feather an' a' !' " 

In his eulogy on Byron, Scott remarks, "There has 
been no reposing under the shade of his laurels, no 
living upon the resource of past reputation ; none of 
that coddling and petty precaution which little authors 

16 



1 82 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

call 'taking care of their fame.' Byron let his fame 
take care of itself." Scott could not have more accu- 
rately described his own character. 

The "Lady of the Lake" was welcomed with an 
enthusiasm surpassing that which attended any other 
of his poems. It seemed like the sweet breathings of 
his native pibroch, stealing over glen and mountain, 
and calling up all the delicious associations of rural 
solitude, which beautifully contrasted with the din of 
battle and the shrill cry of the war-trumpet that stirred 
the soul in every page of his "Marmion." The pub- 
lication of this work carried his fame as a poet to its 
most brilliant height. The post-horse duty rose to an 
extraordinary degree in Scotland, from the eagerness 
of travellers to visit the localities of the poem. A 
more substantial evidence was afforded in its amazing 
circulation, and, consequently, its profits. The press 
could scarcely keep pace with the public demand, and 
no less than fifty thousand copies of it have been sold 
since the date of its appearance. The successful au- 
thor received more than two thousand guineas from his 
production. Milton received ten pounds for the two 
editions which he lived to see of his "Paradise Lost." 
The Ayrshire bard had sighed for "a lass wi' a tocher." 
Scott had now found one where it was hardly to be 
expected, in the Muse. 

While the poetical fame of Scott was thus at its 
zenith, a new star rose above the horizon, whose ec- 
centric course and dazzling radiance completely be- 
wildered the spectator. In 1812, " Childe Harold" 
appeared, and the attention seemed to be now called 
for the first time from the outward form of man and 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 183 

visible nature to the secret depths of the soul. The 
darkest recesses of human passion were laid open, and 
the note of sorrow was prolonged in tones of agonized 
.sensibility, the more touching as coming from one who 
was placed on those dazzling heights of rank and fash- 
ion which, to the vulgar eye at least, seem to lie in 
unclouded sunshine. Those of the present generation 
who have heard only the same key thrummed ad naic- 
seam by the feeble imitators of his lordship can form no 
idea of the effect produced when the chords were first 
swept by the master's fingers. It was found' impossible 
for the ear, once attuned to strains of such compass 
and ravishing harmony, to return with the same relish 
to purer, it might be, but tamer melody; and the 
sweet voice of the Scottish minstrel lost much of its 
power to charm, let him charm never so wisely. While 
" Rokeby" was in preparation, bets were laid on the 
rival candidates by the wits of the day. The sale of 
this poem, though great, showed a sensible decline in 
the popularity of its author. This became still more 
evident on the publication of "The Lord of the Isles;" 
and Scott admitted the conviction with his character- 
istic spirit and good nature. " 'Well, James' " (he said 
to his printer), " 'I have given you a week — what are 
people saying about the Lord of the Isles?' I hesitated 
a little, after the fashion of Gil Bias, but he speedily 
brought the matter to a point. 'Come,' he said, 'speak 
out, my good fellow ; what has put it into your head 
to be on so much ceremony with me all of a sudden ? 
But I see how it is ; the result is given in one word, — 
Disappointment.' 1 My silence admitted his inference 
to the fullest extent. His countenance certainly did 



1 84 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

look rather blank for a few seconds; in truth, he had 
been wholly unprepared for the event. At length he 
said, with perfect cheerfulness, 'Well, well, James, so 
be it ; but you know we must not droop, for we can't 
afford to give over. Since one line has failed, we must 
stick to something else.' This something else was a 
mine he had already hit upon, of invention and sub- 
stantial wealth, such as Thomas the Rhymer, or Michael 
Scott, or any other adept in the black art had never 
dreamed of. 

Everybody knows the story of the composition of 
" Waverley," — the most interesting story in the annals 
of letters, — and how, some ten years after its com- 
mencement, it was fished out of some old lumber in 
an attic and completed in a few weeks for the press in 
1814. Its appearance marks a more distinct epoch in 
English literature than that of the poetry of its author. 
All previous attempts in the same school of fiction — a 
school of English growth — had been cramped by the 
limited information or talent of the writers. Smollett 
had produced his spirited sea-pieces, and Fielding his 
warm sketches of country life, both of them mixed up 
with so much Billingsgate as required a strong flavor of 
wit to make them tolerable. Richardson had covered 
acres of canvas with his faithful family pictures. Mrs. 
Radcliffe had dipped up to the elbows in horrors ; 
while Miss Burney's fashionable gossip, and Miss Edge- 
worth's Hogarth drawings of the prose — not the poetry 
— of life and character, had each and all found favor 
in their respective ways. But a work now appeared in 
which the author swept over the whole range of char- 
acter with entire freedom as well as fidelity, ennobling 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 185 

the whole by high historic associations, and in a style 
varying with his theme, but whose pure and classic flow 
was tinctured with just so much of poetic coloring 
as suited the purposes of romance. It was Shakspeare 
in prose. 

The work was published, as we know, anonymously. 
Mr. Gillies states, however, that, while in the press, 
fragments of it were communicated to "Mr. Macken- 
zie, Dr. Brown, Mrs. Hamilton, and other savans or 
savantes, whose dicta on the merits of a new novel 
were considered unimpeachable." By their approba- 
tion "a strong body of friends was formed, and the 
curiosity of the public prepared the way for its recep- 
tion." This may explain the rapidity with which the 
anonymous publication rose into a degree of favor 
which, though not less surely, perhaps, it might have 
been more slow in achieving. The author jealously 
preserved his incognito, and, in order to heighten the 
mystification, flung off almost simultaneously a variety 
of works, in prose and poetry, any one of which might 
have been the labor of months. The public for a mo- 
ment was at fault. There seemed to be six Richmonds 
in the field. The world, therefore, was reduced to the 
dilemma of either supposing that half a dozen different 
hands could work in precisely the same style, or that 
one could do the work of half a dozen. With time, 
however, the veil wore thinner and thinner, until at 
length, and long before the ingenious argument of 
Mr. Adolphus, there was scarcely a critic so purblind 
as not to discern behind it the features of the mighty 
minstrel. 

Constable had offered seven hundred pounds for the 

16* 



1 86 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

new novel. " It was," says Mr. Lockhart, "ten times 
as much as Miss Edgeworth ever realized from any 
of her popular Irish tales." Scott declined the offer, 
which had been a good one for the bookseller had he 
made it as many thousand. But it passed the art of 
necromancy to divine this. 

Scott, once entered on this new career, followed it 
up with an energy unrivalled in the history of litera- 
ture. The public mind was not suffered to cool for a 
moment, before its attention was called to another 
miracle of creation from the same hand. Even illness, 
that would have broken the spirits of most men, as it 
prostrated the physical energies of Scott, opposed no 
impediment to the march of composition. When he 
could no longer write he could dictate, and in this 
way, amid the agonies of a racking disease, he com- 
posed "The Bride of Lammermoor," the "Legend 
of Montrose," and a great part of "Ivanhoe." The 
first, indeed, is darkened with those deep shadows that 
might seem thrown over it by the sombre condition of 
its author. But what shall we say of the imperturbable 
dry humor of the gallant Captain Dugald Dalgetty 
of Drumthwacket, or of the gorgeous revelries of 
Ivanhoe, — 

" Such sights as youthful poets dream 
On summer eves by haunted stream," — 

what shall we say of such brilliant day-dreams for a 
bed of torture? Never before had the spirit triumphed 
over such agonies of the flesh. " The best way," said 
Scott, in one of his talks with Gillies, " is, if possible, 
to triumph over disease by setting it at defiance; some- 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 187 

what on the same principle as one avoids being stung 
by boldly grasping a nettle." 

The prose fictions were addressed to a much larger 
audience than the poems could be. They had attrac- 
tions for every age and every class. The profits, of 
course, were commensurate. Arithmetic has never 
been so severely taxed as in the computation of Scott's 
productions and the proceeds resulting from them. In 
one year he received (or, more properly, was credited 
with, for it is somewhat doubtful how much he actually 
received) fifteen thousand pounds for his novels, com- 
prehending the first edition and the copyright. The 
discovery of this rich mine furnished its fortunate pro- 
prietor with the means of gratifying the fondest and 
even most chimerical desires. He had always coveted 
the situation of a lord of acres, — a Scottish laird, — 
where his passion for planting might find scope in the 
creation of whole forests, — for every thing with him 
was on a magnificent scale, — and where he might in- 
dulge the kindly feelings of his nature in his benevo- 
lent offices to a numerous and dependent tenantry. 
The few acres of the original purchase now swelled 
into hundreds, and, for aught we know, thousands; for 
one tract alone we find incidentally noticed as costing 
thirty thousand pounds. "It rounds off the property 
so handsomely," he says, in one of his letters. There 
was always a corner to "round off." The mansion, 
in the mean time, from a simple cottage ornee, was 
amplified into the dimensions almost, as well as the 
bizarre proportions, of some old feudal castle. The 
furniture and decorations were of the costliest kind ; 
the wainscots of oak and cedar ; the floors tessellated 



1 88 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

with marbles, or woods of different dyes; the ceil- 
ings fretted and carved with the delicate tracery of a 
Gothic abbey; the storied windows blazoned with the 
richly-colored insignia of heraldry, the walls garnished 
with time-honored trophies, or curious specimens of 
art, or volumes sumptuously bound, — in short, with all 
that luxury could demand or ingenuity devise; while 
a copious reservoir of gas supplied every corner of 
the mansion with such fountains of light as must have 
puzzled the genius of the lamp to provide for the less 
fortunate Aladdin. 

Scott's exchequer must have been seriously taxed in 
another form by the crowds of visitors whom he enter- 
tained under his hospitable roof. There was scarcely 
a person of note, or, to say truth, not of note, who 
visited that country without paying his respects to the 
Lion of Scotland. Lockhart reckons up a full sixth 
of the British peerage who had been there within his 
recollection ; and Captain Hall, in his amusing Notes, 
remarks that it was not unusual for a dozen or more 
coach-loads to find their way into his grounds in the 
course of the day, most of whom found or forced an 
entrance into the mansion. Such was the heavy tax 
paid by his celebrity, and, we may add, his good 
nature ; for if the one had been a whit less than the 
other he could never have tolerated such a nuisance. 

The cost of his correspondence gives one no light 
idea of the demands made on his time, as well as 
purse, in another form. His postage for letters, inde- 
pendently of franks, by which a large portion of it 
was covered, amounted to a hundred and fifty pounds, 
it seems, in the course of the year. In this, indeed, 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 189 

should be included ten pounds for a pair of unfortu- 
nate Cherokee Lovers, sent all the way from our own 
happy land in order to be godfathered by Sir Walter 
on the London boards. Perhaps the smart-money he 
had to pay on this interesting occasion had its influ- 
ence in mixing up rather more acid than was natural 
to him in his judgments of our countrymen. At all 
events, the Yankees find little favor on the few occa- 
sions on which he has glanced at them in his corre- 
spondence. "I am not at all surprised," he says, in 
a letter to Miss Edgeworth, " I am not at all surprised 
at what you say of the Yankees. They are a people 
possessed of very considerable energy, quickened and 
brought into eager action by an honorable love of their 
country and pride in their institutions; but they are 
as yet rude in their ideas of social intercourse, and 
totally ignorant, speaking generally, of all the art of 
good breeding, which consists chiefly in a postpone- 
ment of one's own petty wishes or comforts to those 
of others. By rude questions and observations, an 
absolute disrespect to other people's feelings, and a 
ready indulgence of their own, they make one feverish 
in their company, though perhaps you may be ashamed 
to confess the reason. But this will wear off, and is 
already wearing away. Men, when they have once got 
benches, will soon fall into the use of cushions. They 
are advancing in the lists of our literature, and they 
will not be long deficient in the petite morale, especially 
as they have, like ourselves, the rage for travelling." 
On another occasion, he does, indeed, admit having 
met with, in the course of his life, "four or five well- 
lettered Americans, ardent in pursuit of knowledge, 



190 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



and free from the ignorance and forward presumption 
which distinguish many of their countrymen." This 
seems hard measure ; but perhaps we should find it dif- 
ficult, among the many who have visited this country, 
to recollect as great a number of Englishmen — and 
Scotchmen to boot — entitled to a higher degree of 
commendation. It can hardly be that the well-in- 
formed and well-bred men of both countries make a 
point of staying at home ; so we suppose we must look 
for the solution of the matter in the existence of some 
disagreeable ingredient, common to the characters of 
both nations, sprouting, as they do, from a common 
stock, which remains latent at home, and is never fully 
disclosed till they get into a foreign climate. But, 
as this problem seems pregnant with philosophical, 
physiological, and, for aught we know, psychological 
matter, we have not courage for it here, but recom- 
mend the solution to Miss Martineau, to whom it will 
afford a very good title for a new chapter in her next 
edition. The strictures we have quoted, however, to 
speak more seriously, are worth attending to, coming as 
they do from a shrewd observer, and one whose judg- 
ments, though here somewhat colored, no doubt, by 
political prejudice, are in the main distinguished by 
a sound and liberal philanthropy. But were he ten 
times an enemy, we would say, "Fas est ab hoste 
doceri." 

With the splendid picture of the baronial residence 
at Abbotsford, Mr. Lockhart closes all that at this 
present writing we have received of his delightful work 
in this country; and in the last sentence the melan- 
choly sound of "the muffled drum" gives ominous 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



191 



warning of what we are to expect in the sixth and 
concluding volume. In the dearth of more authentic 
information, we will piece out our sketch with a few 
facts gleaned from the somewhat meagre bill of fare — 
meagre by comparison with the rich banquet of the 
true Amphitryon — afforded by the "Recollections" 
of Mr. Robert Pierce Gillies. 

The unbounded popularity of the Waverley Novels 
led to still more extravagant anticipations on the part 
both of the publishers and author. Some hints of a 
falling off, though but slightly, in the public favor, 
were unheeded by both parties, though, to say truth, 
the exact state of things was never disclosed to Scott, 
it being Ballantyne's notion that it would prove a 
damper, and that the true course was "to press on 
more sail as the wind lulled." In these sanguine cal- 
culations, not only enormous sums, or, to speak cor- 
rectly, bills t were given for what had been written, but 
the author's drafts, to the amount of many thousand 
pounds, were accepted by Constable in favor of works 
the very embryos of which lay, not only unformed, 
but unimagined, in the womb of time. In return for 
this singular accommodation, Scott was induced to 
endorse the drafts of his publisher, and in this way an 
amount of liabilities was incurred which, considering 
the character of the house and its transactions, it is 
altogether inexplicable that a person in the independ- 
ent position of Sir Walter Scott should have subjected 
himself to for a moment. He seems to have had en- 
tire confidence in the stability of the firm, a confidence 
to which it seems, from Mr. Gillies's account, not to 
have been entitled from the first moment of his con- 



192 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



nection with it. The great reputation of the house, 
however, the success and magnitude of some of its 
transactions, especially the publication of these novels, 
gave it a large credit, which enabled it to go forward 
with a great show of prosperity in ordinary times, and 
veiled its tottering state probably from Constable's 
own eyes. It is but the tale of yesterday. The case 
of Constable & Co. is, unhappily, a very familiar one 
to us. But when the hurricane of 1825 came on, it 
swept away all those buildings that were not founded 
on a rock, and those of Messrs. Constable, among 
others, soon became literally mere castles in the air: 
in plain English, the firm stopped payment. The assets 
were very trifling in comparison with the debts ; and 
Sir Walter Scott was found on their paper to the 
frightful amount of one hundred thousand pounds ! 

His conduct on the occasion was precisely what was 
to have been anticipated from one who had declared, 
on a similar though much less appalling conjuncture, 
"I am always ready to make any sacrifices to do justice 
to my engagements, and would rather sell any thing, 
or every thing, than be less than a true man to the 
world." He put up his house and furniture in town at 
auction, delivered over his personal effects at Abbots- 
ford, his plate, books, furniture, etc., to be held in 
trust for his creditors (the estate itself had been re- 
cently secured to his son on occasion of his marriage), 
and bound himself to discharge a certain amount an- 
nually of the liabilities of the insolvent firm. He 
then, with his characteristic energy, set about the per- 
formance of his Herculean task. He took lodgings 
in a third-rate house in St. David's Street, saw but 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 193 

little company, abridged the hours usually devoted to 
his meals and his family, gave up his ordinary exercise, 
and, in short, adopted the severe habits of a regular 
Grub Street stipendiary. 

"For many years," he said to Mr. Gillies, "I have 
been accustomed to hard work, because I found it a 
pleasure; now, with all due respect for Falstaff's prin- 
ciple, 'nothing on compulsion,' I certainly will not 
shrink from work because it has become necessary." 

One of his first tasks was his "Life of Bonaparte," 
achieved in the space of thirteen months. For this 
he received fourteen thousand pounds, about eleven 
hundred per month, — not a bad bargain either, as it 
proved, for the publishers. The first two volumes of 
the nine which make up the English edition were a 
rifach?iento of what he had before compiled for the 
"Annual Register." With every allowance for the 
inaccuracies and the excessive expansion incident to 
such a flashing rapidity of execution, the work, taking 
into view the broad range of its topics, its shrewd 
and sagacious reflections, and the free, bold, and 
picturesque coloring of its narration, and, above all, 
considering the brief time in which it was written, is 
indisputably one of the most remarkable monuments 
of genius and industry — perhaps the most remarkable 
— ever recorded. 

Scott's celebrity made every thing that fell from 
him, however trifling, — the dew-drops from the lion's 
mane, — of value. But none of the many adventures 
he embarked in, or, rather, set afloat, proved so profit- 
able as the republication of his novels with his notes 
and illustrations. As he felt his own strength in the 
1 17 



194 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



increasing success of his labors, he appears to have 
relaxed somewhat from them, and to have again re- 
sumed somewhat of his ancient habits, and, in a miti- 
gated degree, his ancient hospitality. But still his 
exertions were too severe, and pressed heavily on the 
springs of his health, already deprived by age of their 
former elasticity and vigor. At length, in 1831, he 
was overtaken by one of those terrible shocks of par- 
alysis which seem to have been constitutional in his 
family, but which, with more precaution and under 
happier auspices, might doubtless have been post- 
poned, if not wholly averted. At this time he had, 
in the short space of little more than five years, by his 
sacrifices and efforts, discharged about two-thirds of 
the debt for which he was responsible, — an astonishing 
result, wholly unparalleled in the history of letters. 
There is something inexpressibly painful in this spec- 
tacle of a generous heart thus courageously contending 
with fortune, bearing up against the tide with uncon- 
querable spirit, and finally overwhelmed by it just 
within reach of shore. 

The rest of his story is one of humiliation and sor- 
row. He was induced to take a voyage to the Conti- 
nent to try the effect of a more genial climate. Under 
the sunny sky of Italy he seemed to gather new 
strength for a while ; but his eye fell with indifference 
on the venerable monuments which in better days 
would have kindled all his enthusiasm. The invalid 
sighed for his own home at Abbotsford. The heat of 
the weather and the fatigue of rapid travel brought 
on another shock, which reduced him to a state of 
deplorable imbecility. In this condition he returned 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



195 



to his own halls, where the sight of early friends, and 
of the beautiful scenery, the creation, as it were, of his 
own hands, seemed to impart a gleam of melancholy 
satisfaction, which soon, however, sunk into insensi- 
bility. To his present situation might well be applied 
the exquisite verses which he indited on another mel- 
ancholy occasion : 

"Yet not the landscape to mine eye 

Bears those bright hues that once it bore ; 
Though Evening, with her richest dye, 
Flames o'er the hills of Ettrick's shore. 

"With listless look along the plain 
I see Tweed's silver current glide, 
And coldly mark the holy fane 
Of Melrose rise in ruined pride. 

"The quiet lake, the balmy air, 

The hill, the stream, the tower, the tree, 
Are they still such as once they were, 
Or is the dreary change in me ?" 

Providence, in its mercy, did not suffer the shattered 
frame long to outlive the glorious spirit which had in- 
formed it. He breathed his last on the 21st of Sep- 
tember, 1832. His remains were deposited, as he had 
always desired, in the hoary abbey of Dryburgh, and 
the pilgrim from many a distant clime shall repair to 
the consecrated spot so long as the reverence for ex- 
alted genius and worth shall survive in the human 
heart. 

This sketch, brief as we could make it, of the literary 
history of Sir Walter Scott, has extended so far as to 
leave but little space for — what Lockhart's volumes 



196 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

afford ample materials for — his personal character. 
Take -it for all and all, it is not too much to say that 
this character is probably the most remarkable on 
record. There is no man of historical celebrity that 
we now recall, who combined in so eminent a degree 
the highest qualities of the moral, the intellectual, and 
the physical. He united in his own character what 
hitherto had been found incompatible. Though a 
poet, and living in an ideal world, he was an exact, 
methodical man of business; though achieving with 
the most wonderful facility of genius, he was patient 
and laborious ; a mousing antiquarian, yet with the 
most active interest in the present and whatever was 
going on around him; with a strong turn for a roving 
life and military adventure, he was yet chained to his 
desk more hours, at some periods of his life, than a 
monkish recluse ; a man with a heart as capacious as 
his head ; a Tory, brimful of Jacobitism, yet full of 
sympathy and unaffected familiarity with all classes, 
even the humblest ; a successful author, without ped- 
antry and without conceit ; one, indeed, at the head 
of the republic of letters, and yet with a lower estimate 
of letters, as compared with other intellectual pursuits, 
than was ever hazarded before. 

The first quality of his character, or, rather, that 
which forms the basis of it, as of all great characters, 
was his energy. We see it, in his early youth, triumph- 
ing over the impediments of nature, and, in spite of 
lameness, making him conspicuous in every sort of 
athletic exercise, — clambering up dizzy precipices, 
wading through treacherous fords, and performing 
feats of pedestrianism that make one's joints ache to 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



197 



read of. As he advanced in life, we see the same force 
of purpose turned to higher objects. A striking ex- 
ample occurs in his organization of the journals and 
the publishing house in opposition to Constable. In 
what Herculean drudgery did not this latter business, 
in which he undertook to supply matter for the nimble 
press of Ballantyne, involve him ! while, in addition 
to his own concerns, he had to drag along by his soli- 
tary momentum a score of heavier undertakings, that 
led Lockhart to compare him to a steam-engine with a 
train of coal-wagons hitched to it. "Yes," said Scott, 
laughing, and making a crashing cut with his axe (for 
they were felling larches), "and there was a cursed lot 
of dung-carts too." 

We see the same powerful energies triumphing over 
disease at a later period, when nothing but a resolution 
to get the better of it enabled him to do so. " Be 
assured," he remarked to Mr. Gillies, "that if pain 
could have prevented my application to literary labor, 
not a page of Ivanhoe would have been written. Now, 
if I had given way to mere feelings, and ceased to 
work, it is a question whether the disorder might not 
have taken a deeper root, and become incurable." 
But the most extraordinary instance of this trait is the 
readiness with which he assumed and the spirit with 
which he carried through, till his mental strength 
broke down under it, the gigantic task imposed on 
him by the failure of Constable. 

It mattered little what the nature of the task was, 
whether it were organizing an opposition to a political 
faction, or a troop of cavalry to resist invasion, or a 
medley of wild Highlanders or Edinburgh cockneys to 

17* 



l 9 8 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

make up a royal puppet-show — a loyal celebration — for 
"His Most Sacred Majesty," he was the master-spirit 
that gave the cue to the whole dramatis persona. This 
potent impulse showed itself in the thoroughness with 
which he prescribed not merely the general orders, but 
the execution of the minutest details, in his own per- 
son. Thus all around him was the creation, as it were, 
of his individual exertion. His lands waved with 
forests planted with his own hands, and, in process of 
time, cleared by his own hands. He did not lay the 
stones in mortar, exactly, for his whimsical castle, but 
he seems to have superintended the operation from the 
foundation to the battlements. The antique relics, the 
curious works of art, the hangings and furniture, even, 
with which his halls were decorated, were specially 
contrived or selected by him ; and, to read his letters 
at this time to his friend Terry, one might fancy him- 
self perusing the correspondence of an upholsterer, so 
exact and technical is he in his instructions. We say 
this not in disparagement of his great qualities. It is 
only the more extraordinary; for, while he stooped to 
such trifles, he was equally thorough in matters of the 
highest moment. It was a trait of character. 

Another quality, which, like the last, seems to have 
given the tone to his character, was his social or benev- 
olent feelings. His heart was an unfailing fountain, 
which not merely the distresses but the joys of his 
fellow-creatures made to flow like water. In early life, 
and possibly sometimes in later, high spirits and a 
vigorous constitution led him occasionally to carry his 
social propensities into convivial excess ; but he never 
was in danger of the habitual excess to which a vulgar 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. T gg 

mind — and sometimes, alas ! one more finely tuned — 
abandons itself. With all his conviviality, it was not 
the sensual relish, but the social, which acted on him. 
He was neither gourme nor gourmand ; but his social 
meetings were endeared to him by the free interchange 
of kindly feelings with his friends. La Bruyere says 
(and it is odd he should have found it out in Louis the 
Fourteenth's court), " the heart has more to do than 
the head with the pleasures, or, rather, promoting the 
pleasures, of society;" " Un horame est d'un meilleur 
commerce dans la societe par le cceur que par 1' esprit." 
If report — the report of travellers — be true, we Amer- 
icans, at least the New Englanders, are too much per- 
plexed with the cares and crosses of life to afford many 
genuine specimens of this bonhommie. However this 
may be, we all, doubtless, know some such character, 
whose shining face, the index of a cordial heart, radiant 
with beneficent pleasure, diffuses its own exhilarating 
glow wherever it appears. Rarely, indeed, is this 
precious quality found united with the most exalted 
intellect. Whether it be that Nature, chary of her 
gifts, does not care to shower too many of them on 
one head, or that the public admiration has led the 
man of intellect to set too high a value on himself, or 
at least his own pursuits, to take an interest in the 
inferior concerns of others, or that the fear of com- 
promising his dignity puts him "on points" with those 
who approach him, or whether, in truth, the very mag- 
nitude of his own reputation throws a freezing shadow 
over us little people in his neighborhood, — whatever 
be the cause, it is too true that the highest powers of 
mind are very often deficient in the only one which 



200 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

can make the rest of much worth in society, — the 
power of pleasing. 

Scott was not one of these little great. His was not 
one of those dark-lantern visages which concentrate all 
their light on their own path and are black as midnight 
to all about them. He had a ready sympathy, a word 
of contagious kindness or cordial greeting, for all. His 
manners, too, were of a kind to dispel the icy reserve 
and awe which his great name was calculated to inspire. 
His frank address was a sort of open sesame to every 
heart. He did not deal in sneers, the poisoned 
weapons which come not from the head, as the man 
who launches them is apt to think, but from an acid 
heart, or, perhaps, an acid stomach, a very common 
laboratory of such small artillery. Neither did Scott 
amuse the company with parliamentary harangues or 
metaphysical disquisitions. His conversation was of 
the narrative kind, not formal, but as casually suggested 
by some passing circumstance or topic, and thrown in 
by way of illustration. He did not repeat himself, 
however, but continued to give his anecdotes such 
variations, by rigging them out in a new "cocked hat 
and walking-cane," as he called it, that they never 
tired like the thrice-told tale of a chronic raconteur. 
He allowed others, too, to take their turn, and thought 
with the Dean of St. Patrick's : 

" Carve to all, but just enough ; 
Let them neither starve nor stuff; 
And, that you may have your due, 
Let your neighbors carve for you." 

He relished a good joke, from whatever quarter it came, 
and was not over-dainty in his manner of testifying his 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 2 ot 

satisfaction. "In the full tide of mirth, he did in- 
deed laugh the heart's laugh," says Mr. Adolphus. 
"Give me an honest laugher," said Scott himself, on 
another occasion, when a buckram man of fashion had 
been paying him a visit at Abbotsford. His manners, 
free from affectation or artifice of any sort, exhibited 
the spontaneous movements of a kind disposition, 
subject to those rules of good breeding which Nature 
herself might have dictated. In this way he answered 
his own purpose admirably as a painter of character, 
by putting every man in good humor with himself, in 
the same manner as a cunning portrait-painter amuses 
his sitters with such store of fun and anecdote as may 
throw them off their guard and call out the happiest 
expressions of their countenances. 

Scott, in his wide range of friends and companions, 
doos not seem to have been over-fastidious. In the 
instance of John Ballantyne, it has exposed him to 
some censure. In truth, a more worthless fellow never 
hung on the skirts of a great man ; for he did not take 
the trouble to throw a decent veil over the grossest 
excesses. But then he had been the school-boy friend 
of Scott ; had grown up with him in a sort of depend- 
ence, — a relation which begets a kindly feeling in the 
party that confers the benefits, at least. How strong 
it was in him may be inferred from his remark at 
his funeral. "I feel," said Scott, mournfully, as the 
solemnity was concluded, "I feel as if there would be 
less sunshine for me from this day forth." It must be 
admitted, however, that his intimacy with little Rig- 
dumfunnidos, whatever apology it may find in Scott's 
heart, was not very creditable to his taste. 



202 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

But the benevolent principle showed itself not merely 
in words, but in the more substantial form of actions. 
How many are the cases recorded of indigent merit 
which he drew from obscurity and almost warmed into 
life by his own generous and most delicate patronage ! 
Such were the cases, among others, of Leyden, Weber, 
Hogg. How often and how cheerfully did he supply 
such literary contributions as were solicited by his 
friends — and they taxed him pretty liberally — amid all 
the pressure of business, and at the height of his fame, 
when his hours were golden hours to him ! In the 
more vulgar and easier forms of charity he did not 
stint his hand, though, instead of direct assistance, he 
preferred to enable others to assist themselves, — in this 
way fortifying their good habits and relieving them 
from the sense of personal degradation. 

But the place where his benevolent impulses found 
their proper theatre for expansion was his own home, 
surrounded by a happy family, and dispensing all the 
hospitalities of a great feudal proprietor. "There are 
many good things in life," he says, in one of his let- 
ters, "whatever satirists and misanthropes may say to 
the contrary; but probably the best of all, next to a 
conscience void of offence (without which, by-the-by, 
they can hardly exist), are the quiet exercise and en- 
joyment of the social feelings, in which we are at once 
happy ourselves and the cause of happiness to them 
who are dearest to us." Every page of the work, 
almost, shows us how intimately he blended himself 
with the pleasures and the pursuits of his own family, 
watered over the education of his children, shared in 
their rides, their rambles and sports, losing no oppor- 



CRITICAL MISCELLAMES. 



203 



tunity of kindling in their young minds a love of vir- 
tue, and honorable principles of action. He delighted, 
too, to collect his tenantry around him, multiplying 
holidays, when young and old might come together 
under his roof-tree, when the jolly punch was liberally 
dispensed by himself and his wife among the elder 
people, and the Hogmanay cakes and pennies were 
distributed among the young ones, while his own chil- 
dren mingled in the endless reels and hornpipes on 
the earthen floor, and the laird himself, mixing in the 
groups of merry faces, had "his private joke for every 
old wife or 'gausie carle,' his arch compliment for the 
ear of every bonny lass, and his hand and his blessing 
for the head of every little Eppie Daidle from Abbots- 
town or Broomylees." "Sir Walter," said one of his 
old retainers, "speaks to every man as if he were his 
blood relation." No wonder that they should have 
returned this feeling with something warmer than blood 
relations usually do. Mr. Gillies tells an anecdote of 
the Ettrick Shepherd, showing how deep a root such 
feelings, notwithstanding his rather odd way of express- 
ing them sometimes, had taken in his honest nature. 
"Mr. James Ballantyne, walking home with him one 
evening from Scott's, where, by-the-by, Hogg had 
gone uninvited, happened to observe, - 1 do not at all 
like this illness of Scott's. I have often seen him 
look jaded of late, and am afraid it is serious.' 'Haud 
your tongue, or I'll gar you measure your length on the 
pavement!' replied Hogg. 'Youfause, down-hearted 
loon that you are ; ye daur to speak as if Scott were 
on his death-bed ! It cannot be — it must not be ! I 
will not suffer you to speak that gait.' The sentiment 



204 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

was like that of Uncle Toby at the bedside of Le 
Fevre; and, at these words, the Shepherd's voice 
became suppressed with emotion." 

But Scott's sympathies were not confined to his spe- 
cies ; and if he treated them like blood relations, he 
treated his brute followers like personal friends. Every 
one remembers old Maida and faithful Camp, the "dear 
old friend," whose loss cost him a dinner. Mr. Gil- 
lies tells us that he went into his study on one occa- 
sion, when he was winding off his " Vision of Don 
Roderick." "'Look here,' said the poet, 'I have 
just begun to copy over the rhymes that you heard to- 
day and applauded so much. Return to supper, if you 
can ; only don't be late, as you perceive we keep early 
hours, and Wallace will not suffer me to rest after six 
in the morning. Come, good dog, and help the poet.' 
At this hint, Wallace seated himself upright on a chair 
next his master, who offered him a newspaper, which 
he directly seized, looking very wise, and holding it 
firmly and contentedly in his mouth. Scott looked at 
him with great satisfaction, for he was excessively fond 
of dogs. ' Very well/ said he ; ' ?iow we shall get on.' 
And so I left them abruptly, knowing that my ' absence 
would be the best company.' " This fellowship ex- 
tended much farther than to his canine followers, of 
which, including hounds, terriers, mastiffs, and mon- 
grels, he had certainly a goodly assortment. We find, 
also, Grimalkin installed in a responsible post in the 
library, and, out of doors, pet hens, pet donkeys, and — 
tell it not in Judaea — a pet pig ! 

Scott's sensibilities, though easily moved and widely 
diffused, were warm and sincere. None shared more 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 205 

cordially in the troubles of his friends ; but on all such 
occasions, with a true manly feeling, he thought less of 
mere sympathy than of the most effectual way for miti- 
gating their sorrows. After a touching allusion in one 
of his epistles to his dear friend Erskine's death, he con- 
cludes, "I must turn to and see what can be done about 
getting some pension for his daughters." In another 
passage, which may remind one of some of the exqui- 
site touches in Jeremy Taylor, he indulges in the fol- 
lowing beautiful strain of philosophy: "The last three 
or four years have swept away more than half the 
friends with whom I lived in habits of great intimacy. 
So it must be with us 

' When ance life's day draws near the gloamin',' 

and yet we proceed with our plantations and plans as 
if any tree but the sad cypress would accompany us to 
the grave, where our friends have gone before us. It 
is the way of the world, however, and must be so ; 
otherwise life would be spent in unavailing mourning 
for those whom we have lost. It is better to enjoy the 
society of those who remain to us." His well-disci- 
plined heart seems to have confessed the influence of 
this philosophy in his most ordinary relations. "I 
can't help it," was a favorite maxim of his, "and 
therefore will not think about it ; for that, at least, I 
can help." 

Among his admirable qualities must not be omitted 
a certain worldly sagacity or shrewdness, which is 
expressed as strongly as any individual trait can be in 
some of his portraits, especially in the excellent one of 
him by Leslie. Indeed, his countenance would seem to 

18 



206 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

exhibit, ordinarily, much more of Dandie Dinmont's 
benevolent shrewdness than of the eye glancing from 
earth to heaven which in fancy we assign to the poet, 
and which, in some moods, must have been his. This 
trait may be readily discerned in his business transac- 
tions, which he managed with perfect knowledge of 
character as well as of his own rights. No one knew 
better than he the market value of an article ; and, 
though he underrated his literary wares as to their 
mere literary rank, he set as high a money value on 
them and made as sharp a bargain as any of the trade 
could have done. In his business concerns, indeed, he 
managed rather too much, or, to speak more correctly, 
was too fond of mixing up mystery in his transactions, 
which, like most mysteries, proved of little service to 
their author. Scott's correspondence, especially with 
his son, affords obvious examples of shrewdness, in the 
advice he gives as to his deportment in the novel 
situations and society into which the young cornet 
was thrown. Occasionally, in the cautious hints about 
etiquette and social observances, we may be reminded 
of that ancient "arbiter elegantiarum," Lord Chester- 
field, though it must be confessed there is throughout 
a high moral tone, which the noble lord did not very 
scrupulously affect. 

Another feature in Scott's character was his loyalty, 
which some people would extend into a more general 
deference to rank not royal. We do certainly meet 
with a tone of deference, occasionally, to the privileged 
orders (or, rather, privileged persons, as the king, or 
his own chief, for to the mass of stars and garters he 
showed no such respect) which falls rather unpleasantly 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 207 

on the ear of a republican. But, independently of 
the feelings which rightfully belonged to him as the 
subject of a monarchy, and without which he must 
have been a false-hearted subject, his own were height- 
ened by a poetical coloring that mingled in his mind 
even with much more vulgar relations of life. At the 
opening of the regalia in Holyrood House, when the 
honest burgomaster deposited the crown on the head 
of one of the young ladies present, the good man 
probably saw nothing more in the dingy diadem than 
we should have seen, — a headpiece for a set of men no 
better than himself, and. if the old adage of a "dead 
lion" holds true, not quite so good. But to Scott's 
imagination other views were unfolded. "A thousand 
years their cloudy wings expanded" around him, and 
in the dim visions of distant times he beheld the 
venerable line of monarchs who had swayed the coun- 
cils of his country in peace and led her armies in 
battle. The "golden round" became in his eye the 
symbol of his nation's glory; and, as he heaved a 
heavy oath from his heart, he left the room in agita- 
tion, from which he did not speedily recover. There 
was not a spice of affectation in this, — for who ever 
accused Scott of affectation ? — but there was a good 
deal of poetry, the poetry of sentiment. 

We have said that this feeling mingled in the more 
common concerns of his life. His cranium, indeed, 
to judge from his busts, must have exhibited a strong 
development of the organ of veneration. He regarded 
with reverence every thing connected with antiquity. 
His establishment was on the feudal scale ; his house 
was fashioned more after the feudal ages than his own ; 



2 o8 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

and even in the ultimate distribution of his fortune, 
although the circumstance of having made it himself 
relieved him from any legal necessity of contravening 
the suggestions of natural justice, he showed such 
attachment to the old aristocratic usage as to settle 
nearly the whole of it on his eldest son. 

The influence of this poetic sentiment is discernible 
in his most trifling acts, in his tastes, his love of 
the arts, his social habits. His museum, house, and 
grounds were adorned with relics curious not so much 
from their workmanship as their historic associations. 
It was the ancient fountain from Edinburgh, the Tol- 
booth lintels, the blunderbuss and spleughan of Rob 
Roy, the drinking-cup of Prince Charlie, or the like. 
It was the same in the arts. The tunes he loved were 
not the refined and complex melodies of Italy, but the 
simple notes of his native minstrelsy, from the bagpipe 
of John of Skye, or from the harp of his own lovely 
and accomplished daughter. So, also, in painting. It 
was not the masterly designs of the great Flemish and 
Italian schools that adorned his walls, but some portrait 
of Claverhouse, or of Queen Mary, or of " glorious old 
John." In architecture we see the same spirit in the 
singular "romance of stone and lime," which may be 
said to have been his own device, down to the minutest 
details of its finishing. We see it again in the joyous 
celebrations of his feudal tenantry, the good old fes- 
tivals, the Hogmanay, the Kirn, etc., long fallen into 
desuetude, when the old Highland piper sounded the 
same wild pibroch that had so often summoned the 
clans together, for war or for wassail, among the fast- 
nesses of the mountains. To the same source, in fine, 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 209 

may be traced the feelings of superstition which seemed 
to hover round Scott's mind like some "strange, 
mysterious dream," giving a romantic coloring to his 
conversation and his writings, but rarely, if ever, 
influencing his actions. It was a poetic sentiment. 

Scott was a Tory to the backbone. Had he come 
into the world half a century sooner, he would, no 
doubt, have made a figure under the banner of the 
Pretender. He was at no great pains to disguise his 
political creed; witness his jolly drinking-song on the 
acquittal of Lord Melville. This was verse ; but his 
prose is not much more qualified. "As for Whiggery 
in general," he says, in one of his letters, " I can only 
say that, as no man can be said to be utterly overset 
until his rump has been higher than his head, so I can- 
not read in history of any free state which has been 
brought to slavery until the rascal and uninstructed 
populace had had their short hour of anarchical gov- 
ernment, which naturally leads to the stern repose of 

military despotism With these convictions, I am 

very jealous of Whiggery under all modifications, and 
I must say my acquaintance with the total want of 
principle in some of its warmest professors does not 
tend to recommend it." With all this, however, 
his Toryism was not, practically, of that sort which 
blunts a man's sensibilities for those who are not of 
the same porcelain clay with himself. No man, Whig 
or Radical, ever had less of this pretension, or treated 
his inferiors with greater kindness, and even familiar- 
ity, — a circumstance noticed by every visitor at his 
hospitable mansion who saw him strolling round his 
grounds, taking his pinch of snuff out of the mull of 

18* 



210 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

some "gray-haired old hedger," or leaning on honest 
Tom Purdie's shoulder and taking sweet counsel as 
to the right method of thinning a plantation. But, 
with all this familiarity, no man was better served by 
his domestics. It was the service of love, the only 
service that power cannot command and money cannot 
buy. 

Akin to the feelings of which we have been speak- 
ing was the truly chivalrous sense of honor which 
stamped his whole conduct. We do not mean that 
Hotspur honor which is roused only by the drum and 
fife, — though he says of himself, "I like the sound of 
a drum as well as Uncle Toby ever did," — but that 
honor which is deep-seated in the heart of every true 
gentleman, shrinking with sensitive delicacy from the 
least stain, or imputation of a stain, on his faith. "If 
we lose every thing else," writes he, on a trying occa- 
sion, to a friend who was not so nice in this particular, 
" we will at least keep our honor unblemished." It 
reminds one of the pithy epistle of a kindred chiv- 
alrous spirit, Francis the First, to his mother, from 
the unlucky field of Pavia: "Tout est perdu, fors 
l'honneur." Scott's latter years furnished a noble 
commentary on the sincerity of his manly principles. 

Little is said directly of his religious sentiments in 
the biography. They seem to have harmonized well 
with his political. He was a member of the English 
Church, a stanch champion of established forms, and 
a sturdy enemy to every thing that savored of the 
sharp tang of Puritanism. On this ground, indeed, 
the youthful Samson used to wrestle manfully with 
worthy Dominie Mitchell, who, no doubt, furnished 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 2 il 

many a screed of doctrine for the Rev. Peter Pound- 
text, Master Nehemiah Holdenough, and other lights 
of the Covenant. Scott was no friend to cant under 
any form. But, whatever were his speculative opin- 
ions, in practice his heart overflowed with that charity 
which is the life -spring of our religion ; and whenever 
he takes occasion to allude to the subject directly he 
testifies a deep reverence for the truths of revelation, 
as well as for its Divine original. 

Whatever estimate be formed of Scott's moral quali- 
ties, his intellectual were of a kind which well entitled 
him to the epithet conferred on Lope de Vega, "mon- 
struo de naturaleza" (a miracle of nature). His mind 
scarcely seemed to be subjected to the same laws that 
control the rest of his species. His memory, as is 
usual, was the first of his powers fully developed. 
While an urchin at school, he could repeat whole 
cantos, he says, of Ossian and of Spenser. In riper 
years we are constantly meeting with similar feats of 
his achievement. Thus, on one occasion he repeated 
the whole of a poem in some penny magazine, inci- 
dentally alluded to, which he had not seen since he 
was a school-boy. On another, when the Ettrick 
Shepherd was trying ineffectually to fish up from his 
own recollections some scraps of a ballad he had him- 
self manufactured years before, Scott called to him, 
"Take your pencil, Jemmy, and I will tell it to you, 
word for word ;" and he accordingly did so. But it 
is needless to multiply examples of feats so startling as 
to look almost like the tricks of a conjurer. 

What is most extraordinary is, that while he acquired 
with such facility that the bare perusal, or the repeti- 



212 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

tion of a thing once to him, was sufficient, he yet re- 
tained it with the greatest pertinacity. Other men's 
memories are so much jostled in the rough and tumble 
of life that most of the facts get sifted out nearly as 
fast as they are put in ; so that we are in the same 
dilemma with those unlucky daughters of Danaus, of 
school-boy memory, obliged to spend the greater part 
of the time in replenishing. But Scott's memory 
seemed to be hermetically sealed, suffering nothing 
once fairly in to leak out again. This was of im- 
mense service to him when he took up the business of 
authorship, as his whole multifarious stock of facts, 
whether from books or observation, became, in truth, 
his stock in trade, ready furnished to his hands. This 
may explain in part — though it is not less marvellous — 
the cause of his rapid execution of works often replete 
with rare and curious information. The labor, the 
preparation, had been already completed. His whole 
life had been a business of preparation. When he ven- 
tured, as in the case of " Rokeby" and of " Quentin 
Durward," on ground with which he had not been 
familiar, we see how industriously he set about new 
acquisitions. 

In most of the prodigies of memory which we have 
ever known, the overgrowth of that faculty seems to 
have been attained at the expense of all the others ; 
but in Scott the directly opposite power of the imagi- 
nation, the inventive power, was equally strongly de- 
veloped, and at the same early age ; for we find him 
renowned for story-craft while at school. How many 
a delightful fiction, warm with the flush of ingenuous 
youth, did he not throw away on the ears of thought- 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



213 



less childhood, which, had they been duly registered, 
might now have amused children of a larger growth ? 
We have seen Scott's genius in its prime and its decay. 
The frolic graces of childhood are alone wanting. 

The facility with which he threw his ideas into lan- 
guage was also remarked very early. One of his first 
ballads, and a long one, was dashed off at the dinner- 
table. His "Lay" was written at the rate of a canto 
a week. " Waverley," or, rather, the last two volumes 
of it, cost the evenings of a summer month. Who 
that has ever read the account can forget the move- 
ments of that mysterious hand, as described by the 
two students from the window of a neighboring attic, 
throwing off sheet after sheet, with untiring rapidity, 
of the pages destined to immortality? Scott speaks 
pleasantly enough of this marvellous facility in a letter 
to his friend Morritt : "When once I set my pen to 
the paper, it will walk fast enough. I am sometimes 
tempted to leave it alone, and see whether it will not 
write as well without the assistance of my head as with 
it. A hopeful prospect for the reader." 

As to the time and place of composition, he appears 
to have been nearly indifferent. He possessed entire 
power of abstraction, and it mattered little whether he 
were nailed to his clerk's desk, under the drowsy elo- 
quence of some long-winded barrister, or dashing his 
horse into the surf on Portobello sands, or rattling in 
a post-chaise, or amid the hum of guests in his over- 
flowing halls at Abbotsford, — it mattered not ; the 
same well-adjusted little packet, "nicely corded and 
sealed," was sure to be ready, at the regular time, for 
the Edinburgh mail. His own account of his compo- 



214 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



sition to a friend, who asked when he found time for 
it, is striking enough. "Oh," said Scott, "I lie sim- 
mering over things for an hour or so before I get up, 
and there's the time I am dressing to overhaul my 
half-sleeping, half- waking ^r<?/<?/ de chapitre ; and when 
I get the paper before me, it commonly runs off pretty 
easily. Besides, I often take a doze in the plantations, 
and while Tom marks out a dike or a drain as I have 
directed, one's fancy may be running its ain riggs in 
some other world." Never did this sort of simmering 
produce such a splendid bill of fare. 

The quality of the material, under such circum- 
stances, is, in truth, the great miracle of the whole. 
The execution of so much work, as a mere feat of pen- 
manship, would undoubtedly be very extraordinary, 
but, as a mere scrivener's miracle, would be hardly 
worth recording. It is a sort of miracle that is every 
day performing under our own eyes, as it were, by 
Messrs. James, Bulwer, & Co., who, in all the various 
staples of "comedy, history, pastoral-comical, histor- 
ical-pastoral," etc., supply their own market, and ours 
too, with all that can be wanted. In Spain, and in 
Italy also, we may find abundance of improvvisatori 
and improvvisatrici, who perform miracles of the same 
sort, in verse too, in languages whose vowel termina- 
tions make it very easy for the thoughts to tumble into 
rhyme without any malice prepense. Sir Stamford 
Raffles, in his account of Java, tells us of a splendid 
avenue of trees before his house, which in the course 
of a year shot up to the height of forty feet. But who 
shall compare the brief, transitory splendors of a 
fungous vegetation with the mighty monarch of the 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



215 



forest, sending his roots deep into the heart of the 
earth, and his branches, amid storm and sunshine, to 
the heavens ? And is not the latter the true emblem 
of Scott ? For who can doubt that his prose creations, 
at least, will gather strength with time, living on 
through succeeding generations, even when the lan- 
guage in which they are written, like those of Greece 
and Rome, shall cease to be a living language ? 

The only writer deserving, in these respects, to be 
named with Scott, is Lope de Vega, who in his own 
day held as high a rank in the republic of letters as 
our great contemporary. The beautiful dramas which 
he threw off for the entertainment of the capital, and 
whose success drove Cervantes from the stage, out- 
stripped the abilities of an amanuensis to copy. His 
intimate friend Montalvan, one of the most popular 
and prolific authors of the time, tells us that he under- 
took with Lope once to supply the theatre with a 
comedy — in verse, and in three acts, as the Spanish 
dramas usually were — at a very short notice. In order 
to get through his half as soon as his partner, he rose 
by two in the morning, and at eleven had completed 
it; an extraordinary feat, certainly, since a play ex- 
tended to between thirty and forty pages, of a hundred 
lines each. Walking into the garden, he found his 
brother poet pruning an orange-tree. "Well, how do 
you get on?" said Montalvan. "Very well," answered 
Lope. "I rose betimes, — at five, — and, after I had 
got through, eat my breakfast; since which I have 
written a letter of fifty triplets, and watered the whole 
of the garden, which has tired me a good deal." 

But a little arithmetic will best show the comparative 



216 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

fertility of Scott and Lope de Vega. It is so germane 
to the present matter that we shall make no apology 
for transcribing here some computations from our last 
July number ; and as few of our readers, we suspect, 
have the air-tight memory of Sir Walter, we doubt not 
that enough of it has escaped them by this time to 
excuse us from equipping it with one of those "cocked 
hats and walking-sticks" with which he furbished up 
an old story. 

"It is impossible to state the results of Lope de 
Vega's labors in any form that will not powerfully 
strike the imagination. Thus, he has left twenty-one 
million three hundred thousand verses in print, besides 
a mass of manuscript. He furnished the theatre, ac- 
cording to the statement of his intimate friend Mon- 
talvan, with eighteen hundred regular plays and four 
hundred autos, or religious dramas, — all acted. He 
composed, according to his own statement, more than 
one hundred comedies in the almost incredible space 
of twenty-four hours each ; and a comedy averaged 
between two and three thousand verses, great part of 
them rhymed, and interspersed with sonnets and other 
more difficult forms of versification. He lived seventy- 
two years ; and, supposing him to have employed fifty 
of that period in composition, although he filled a 
variety of engrossing vocations during that time, he 
must have averaged a play a week, to say nothing of 
twenty-one volumes, quarto, of miscellaneous works, 
including five epics, written in his leisure moments, 
and all now in print ! 

"The only achievements we can recall in literary 
history bearing any resemblance to, though falling far 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



217 



short of this, are those of our illustrious contemporary 
Sir Walter Scott. The complete edition of his works, 
recently advertised by Murray, with the edition of two 
volumes of which Murray has not the copyright, prob- 
ably contains ninety volumes, small octavo. [To these 
should farther be added a large supply of matter for the 
Edinburgh Annual Register, as well as other anony- 
mous contributions.] Of these, forty-eight volumes of 
novels, and twenty-one of history and biography, were 
produced between 1814 and 1831, or in seventeen 
years. These would give an average of four volumes 
a year, or one for every three months during the whole 
of that period ; to which must be added twenty-one 
volumes of poetry and prose, previously published. 
The mere mechanical execution of so much work, 
both in his case and Lope de Vega's, would seem to 
be scarce possible in the limits assigned. Scott, too, 
was as variously occupied in other ways as his Spanish 
rival, and probably, from the social hospitality of his 
life, spent a much larger portion of his time in no 
literary occupation at all." 

Of all the wonderful dramatic creations of Lope de 
Vega's genius, what now remains ? Two or three plays 
only keep possession of the stage, and few, very few, 
are still read with pleasure in the closet. They have 
never been collected into a uniform edition, and are 
now met with in scattered sheets only on the shelves 
of some mousing bookseller, or collected in miscella- 
neous parcels in the libraries of the curious. 

Scott, with all his facility of execution, had none 
of that pitiable affectation sometimes found in men of 
genius, who think that the possession of this quality 

K 19 



2i 8 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

may dispense with regular, methodical habits of study. 
He was most economical of time. He did not, like 
Voltaire, speak of it as "a terrible thing that so much 
time should be wasted in talking." He was too little 
of a pedant, and far too benevolent, not to feel that 
there are other objects worth living for than mere 
literary fame ; but he grudged the waste of time on 
merely frivolous and heartless objects. "As for dress- 
ing when we are quite alone," he remarked one day 
to Mr. Gillies, whom he had taken home with him to a 
family dinner, "it is out of the question. Life is not 
long enough for such fiddle-faddle." In the early part 
of his life he worked late at night, but subsequently, 
from a conviction of the superior healthiness of early 
rising, as well as the desire to secure, at all hazards, a 
portion of the day for literary labor, he rose at five the 
year round ; no small effort, as any one will admit who 
has seen the pain and difficulty which a regular bird 
of night finds in reconciling his eyes to daylight. He 
was scrupulously exact, moreover, in the distribution of 
his hours. In one of his letters to his friend Terry, 
the player, replete, as usual, with advice that seems 
to flow equally from the head and the heart, he says, 
in reference to the practice of dawdling away one's 
time, "A habit of the mind it is which is very apt to 
beset men of intellect and talent, especially when their 
time is not regularly filled up, but left to their own 
arrangement. But it is like the ivy round the oak, and 
ends by limiting, if it does not destroy, the power of 
manly and necessary exertion. I must love a man so 
well, to whom I offer such a word of advice, that I will 
not apologize for it, but expect to hear you are become 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



219 



as regular as a Dutch clock, — hours, quarters, minutes, 
all marked and appropriated. ' ' With the same emphasis 
he inculcates the like habits on. his son. If any man 
might dispense with them, it was surely Scott. But he 
knew that without them the greatest powers of mind 
will run to waste, and water but the desert. 

Some of the literary opinions of Scott are singular, 
considering, too, the position he occupied in the world 
of letters. " I promise you," he says, in an epistle to 
an old friend, " my oaks will outlast my laurels ; and 
I pique myself more on my compositions for manure 
than on any other compositions to which I was ever 
accessary." This may seem badinage ; but he repeat- 
edly, both in writing and conversation, places literature, 
as a profession, below other intellectual professions, and 
especially the military. The Duke of Wellington, the 
representative of the last, seems to have drawn from 
him a very extraordinary degree of deference, which 
we cannot but thinks smacks a little of that strong 
relish for gunpowder which he avows in himself. 

It is not very easy to see on what this low estimate 
of literature rested. As a profession, it has too little 
in common with more active ones to afford much 
ground for running a parallel. The soldier has to do 
with externals ; and his contests and triumphs are over 
matter in its various forms, whether of man or material 
nature. The poet deals with the bodiless forms of air, 
of fancy lighter than air. His business is contem- 
plative; the other's is active, and depends for its 
success on strong moral energy and presence of mind. 
He must, indeed, have genius of the highest order to 
effect his own combinations, anticipate the movements 



220 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

of his enemy, and dart with eagle eye on his vulnerable 
point. But who shall say that this practical genius, if 
we may so term it, is to rank higher in the scale than 
the creative power of the poet, the spark from the mind 
of divinity itself? 

The orator might seem to afford better ground for 
comparison, since, though his theatre of action is 
abroad, he may be said to work with much the same 
tools as the writer. Yet how much of his success 
depends on qualities other than intellectual! "Ac- 
tion," said the father of eloquence, "action, action, 
are the three most essential things to an orator." How 
much depends on the look, the gesture, the magical 
tones of voice, modulated to the passions he has stirred, 
and how much on the contagious sympathies of the 
audience itself, which drown every thing like criticism 
in the overwhelming tide of emotion ! If any one would 
know how much, let him, after patiently standing 

" till his feet throb, 
And his head thumps, to feed upon the breath 
Of patriots bursting with heroic rage," 

read the same speech in the columns of a morning 
newspaper or in the well-concocted report of the 
orator himself. The productions of the writer are 
subjected to a fiercer ordeal. He has no excited 
sympathies of numbers to hurry his readers along over 
his blunders. He is scanned in the calm silence of the 
closet. Every flower of fancy seems here to wither 
under the rude breath of criticism ; every link in the 
chain of argument is subjected to the touch of prying 
scrutiny, and if there be the least flaw in it it is sure 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 221 

to be detected. There is no tribunal so stern as the 
secret tribunal of a man's own closet, far removed 
from all the sympathetic impulses of humanity. Surely 
there is no form in which intellect can be exhibited to 
the world so completely stripped of all adventitious 
aids as the form of written composition. But, says 
the practical man, let us estimate things by their 
utility. "You talk of the poems of Homer," said a 
mathematician, "but, after all, what do they prove ?" 
A question which involves an answer somewhat too 
voluminous for the tail of an article. But if the poems 
of Homer were, as Heeren asserts, the principal bond 
which held the Grecian states together and gave them 
a national feeling, they "prove" more than all the 
arithmeticians of Greece — and there were many cun- 
ning ones in it — ever proved. The results of military 
skill are indeed obvious. The soldier, by a single 
victory, enlarges the limits of an empire ; he may do 
more, — he may achieve the liberties of a nation, or roll 
back the tide of barbarism ready to overwhelm them. 
Wellington was placed in such a position, and nobly 
did he do his work ; or, rather, he was placed at the 
head of such a gigantic moral and physical apparatus 
as enabled him to do it. With his own unassisted 
strength, of course, he could have done nothing. But 
it is on his own solitary resources that the great writer 
is to rely. And yet who shall say that the triumphs 
of Wellington have been greater than those of Scott, 
whose works are familiar as household words to every 
fireside in his own land, from the castle to the cottage, 
— have crossed oceans and deserts, and, with healing 
on their wings, found their way to the remotest re- 

19* 



222 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

gions, — have helped to form the character, until his 
own mind may be said to be incorporated into those 
of hundreds of thousands of his fellow-men ? Who is 
there that has not, at some time or other, felt the 
heaviness of his heart lightened, his pains mitigated, 
and his bright moments of life made still brighter by 
the magical touches of his genius ? And shall we speak 
of his victories as less real, less serviceable to humanity, 
less truly glorious than those of the greatest captain of 
his day ? The triumphs of the warrior are bounded by 
the narrow theatre of his own age ; but those of a Scott 
or a Shakspeare will be renewed with greater and greater 
lustre in ages yet unborn, when the victorious chieftain 
shall be forgotten, or shall live only in the song of the 
minstrel and the page of the chronicler. 

But, after all, this sort of parallel is not very gracious 
nor very philosophical, and, to say truth, is somewhat 
foolish. We have been drawn into it by the not 
random, but very deliberate and, in our poor judg- 
ment, very disparaging estimate by Scott of his own 
vocation ; and, as we have taken the trouble to write 
it, our readers will excuse us from blotting it out. 
There is too little ground for the respective parties to 
stand on for a parallel. As to the pedantic cut bono 
standard, it is impossible to tell the final issues of a 
single act ; how can we then hope to those of a course 
of action? As for the honor of different vocations, 
there never was a truer sentence than the stale one of 
Pope, — stale now, because it is so true, — ■ 

"Act well your part — there all the honor lies." 

And it is the just boast of our own country that in no 
civilized nation is the force of this philanthropic maxim 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 223 

so nobly illustrated as in ours, — thanks to our glorious 
institutions. 

A great cause, probably, of Scott's low estimate of 
letters was the facility with which he wrote. What 
costs us little we are apt to prize little. If diamonds 
were as common as pebbles, and gold-dust as any other, 
who would stoop to gather them ? It was the prostitu- 
tion of his muse, by-the-by, for this same gold-dust, 
which brought a sharp rebuke on the poet from Lord 
Byron, in his ''English Bards:" 

" For this we spurn Apollo's venal son ;" 

a coarse cut, and the imputation about as true as most 
satire, — that is, not true at all. This was indited in 
his lordship's earlier days, when he most chivalrously 
disclaimed all purpose of bartering his rhymes for gold. 
He lived long enough, however, to weigh his literary 
wares in the same money-balance used by more vulgar 
manufacturers ; and, in truth, it would be ridiculous 
if the produce of the brain should not bring its price 
in this form as well as any other. There is little 
danger, we imagine, of finding too much gold in the 
bowels of Parnassus. 

Scott took a more sensible view of things. In a 
letter to Ellis, written soon after the publication of 
" The Minstrelsy," he observes, " People may say this 
and that of the pleasure of fame, or of profit, as a 
motive of writing ; I think the only pleasure is in the 
actual exertion and research, and I would no more 
write on any other terms than I would hunt merely 
to dine upon hare soup. At the same time, if credit 
and profit came unlooked for, I would no more quarrel 



224 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



with them than with the soup." Even this declaration 
was somewhat more magnanimous than was warranted 
by his subsequent conduct. The truth is, he soon found 
out, especially after the Waverley vein had opened, that 
he had hit on a gold-mine. The prodigious returns he 
got gave the whole thing the aspect of a speculation. 
Every new work was an adventure, and the proceeds 
naturally suggested the indulgence of the most extrav- 
agant schemes of expense, which, in their turn, stimu- 
lated him to fresh efforts. In this way the "profits" 
became, whatever they might have been once, a prin- 
cipal incentive to, as they were the recompense of, 
exertion. His productions were cash articles, and were 
estimated by him more on the Hudibrastic rule of "the 
real worth of a thing" than by any fanciful standard 
of fame. He bowed with deference to the judgment 
of the booksellers, and trimmed his sails dexterously as 
the " aura popularis" shifted. " If it's na weil bobbit," 
he writes to his printer, on turning out a less lucky 
novel, "we'll bobbit again." His muse was of that 
school who seek the greatest happiness of the greatest 
number. We can hardly imagine him invoking her like 
Milton : 

" Still govern thou my song, 
Urania, and fit audience find, though few." 

Still less can we imagine him, like the blind old bard, 
feeding his soul with visions of posthumous glory, and 
spinning out epics for five pounds apiece. 

It is singular that Scott, although he set as high a 
money value on his productions as the most enthusi- 
astic of the " trade" could have done, in a literary 
view should have held them so cheap. "Whatever 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



225 



others may be," he said, "I have never been a par- 
tisan of my own poetry; as John Wilkes declared 
that, 'in the height of his success, he had himself 
never been a Wilkite. ' " Considering the poet's pop- 
ularity, this was but an indifferent compliment to the 
taste of his age. With all this disparagement of his 
own productions, however, Scott was not insensible 
to criticism. He says somewhere that, "if he had 
been conscious of a single vulnerable point in himself, 
he would not have taken up the business of writing;" 
but on another occasion he writes, "I make it a rule 
never to read the attacks made upon me;" and Cap- 
tain Hall remarks, "He never reads the criticisms on 
his books ; this I know from the most unquestionable 
authority. Praise, he says, gives him no pleasure, and 
censure annoys him." Madame de Graffigny says, 
also, of Voltaire, "that he was altogether indifferent 
to praise, but the least word from his enemies drove 
him crazy." Yet both these authors banqueted on the 
sweets of panegyric as much as any who ever lived. 
They were in the condition of an epicure whose palate 
has lost its relish for the dainty fare in which it has 
been so long revelling, without becoming less sensible 
to the annoyances of sharper and coarser flavors. It 
may afford some consolation to humble mediocrity, to 
the less fortunate votaries of the muse, that those who 
have reached the summit of Parnassus are not much 
more contented with their condition than those who 
are scrambling among the bushes at the bottom of the 
mountain. The fact seems to be, as Scott himself in- 
timates more than once, that the joy is in the chase, 
whether in the prose or the poetry of life. 

K* 



226 CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

But it is high time to terminate our lucubrations, 
which, however imperfect and unsatisfactory, have 
already run to a length that must trespass on the pa- 
tience of the reader. We rise from the perusal of these 
delightful volumes with the same sort of melancholy 
feeling with which we wake from a pleasant dream. 
The concluding volume, of which such ominous pre- 
sage is given in the last sentence of the fifth, has not 
yet reached us ; but we know enough to anticipate the 
sad catastrophe it is to unfold of the drama. In those 
which we have seen, we have beheld a succession of 
interesting characters come upon the scene and pass 
away to their long home. " Bright eyes now closed 
in dust, gay voices forever silenced," seem to haunt us, 
too, as we write. The imagination reverts to Abbots- 
ford, — the romantic and once brilliant Abbotsford, — 
the magical creation of his hands. We see its halls 
radiant with the hospitality of his benevolent heart ; 
thronged with pilgrims from every land, assembled to 
pay homage at the shrine of genius ; echoing to the 
blithe music of those festal holidays when young and 
old met to renew the usages of the good old times. 

" These were its charms, but all these charms are fled." 

Its courts are desolate, or trodden only by the foot 
of the stranger. The stranger sits under the shadows 
of the trees which his hand planted. The spell of the 
enchanter is dissolved ; his wand is broken ; and the 
mighty minstrel himself now sleeps in the bosom of 
the peaceful scenes embellished by his taste, and which 
his genius has made immortal. 



CHATEAUBRIAND'S ENGLISH LITERA- 
TURE.* 

(October, 1839.) 

There are few topics of greater attraction, or, when 
properly treated, of higher importance, than literary 
history. For what is it but a faithful register of the 
successive steps by which a nation has advanced in the 
career of civilization? Civil history records the crimes 
and the follies, the enterprises, discoveries, and tri- 
umphs, it may be, of humanity. But to what do all 
these tend, or of what moment are they in the eye of 
the philosopher, except as they accelerate or retard the 
march of civilization ? The history of literature is the 
history of the human mind. It is, as compared with 
other histories, the intellectual as distinguished from 
the material, — the informing spirit, as compared with 
the outward and visible. 

When such a view of the mental progress of a people 
is combined with individual biography, we have all the 
materials for the deepest and most varied interest. The 
life of the man of letters is not always circumscribed 
by the walls of a cloister, and was not, even in those 
days when the cloister was the familiar abode of 
science. The history of Dante and of Petrarch is the 

*" Sketches of English Literature; with Considerations on the 
Spirit of the Times, Men, and Revolutions. By the Viscount de 
Chateaubriand." 2 vols. 8vo. London, 1836. 

(227) 



228 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

best commentary on that of their age. In later times, 
the man of letters has taken part in all the principal 
concerns of public and social life. But, even when 
the story is to derive its interest from personal charac- 
ter, what a store of entertainment is supplied by the 
eccentricities of genius, — the joys and sorrows, not 
visible to vulgar eyes, but which agitate his finer sensi- 
bilities as powerfully as the greatest shocks of worldly 
fortune would a hardier and less visionary temper ! 
What deeper interest can romance afford than is to be 
gathered from the melancholy story of Petrarch, Tasso, 
Alfieri, Rousseau, Byron, Burns, and a crowd of famil- 
iar names, whose genius seems to have been given them 
only to sharpen their sensibility to suffering? What 
matter if their sufferings were, for the most part, of 
the imagination? They were not the less real to them. 
They lived in a world of imagination, and, by the gift 
of genius, unfortunate to its proprietor, have known 
how, in the language of one of the most unfortunate, 
"to make madness beautiful" in the eyes of others. 

But, notwithstanding the interest and importance 
of literary history, it has hitherto received but little 
attention from English writers. No complete survey 
of the treasures of our native tongue has been yet pro- 
duced, or even attempted. The earlier periods of the 
poetical development of the nation have been well 
illustrated by various antiquaries. Warton has brought 
the history of poetry down to the season of its first 
vigorous expansion, — the age of Elizabeth. But he 
did not penetrate beyond the magnificent vestibule of 
the temple. Dr. Johnson's "Lives of the Poets" have 
done much to supply the deficiency in this depart- 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



229 



ment. But much more remains to be done to afford 
the student any thing like a complete view of the pro- 
gress of poetry in England. Johnson's work, as every 
one knows, is conducted on the most capricious and 
irregular plan. The biographies were dictated by the 
choice of the bookseller. Some of the most memorable 
names in British literature are omitted to make way 
for a host of minor luminaries, whose dim radiance, 
unassisted by the critic's magnifying lens, would never 
have penetrated to posterity. The same irregularity is 
visible in the proportion he has assigned to each of his 
subjects; the principal figures, or what should have 
been such, being often thrown into the background 
to make room for some subordinate person whose story 
was thought to have more interest. 

Besides these defects of plan, the critic was cer- 
tainly deficient in sensibility to the more delicate, the 
minor beauties of poetic sentiment. He analyzes verse 
in the cold-blooded spirit of a chemist, until all the 
aroma which constituted its principal charm escapes in 
the decomposition. By this kind of process, some of 
the finest fancies of the Muse, the lofty dithyrambics 
of Gray, the ethereal effusions of Collins, and of Mil- 
ton too, are rendered sufficiently vapid. In this sort 
of criticism, all the effect that relies on impressions 
goes for nothing. Ideas are alone taken into the ac- 
count, and all is weighed in the same hard, matter-of- 
fact scales of common sense, like so much solid prose. 
What a sorry figure would Byron's Muse make sub- 
jected to such an ordeal ! The doctor's taste in com- 
position, to judge from his own style, was not of the 
highest order. It was a style, indeed, of extraordinary 

20 



230 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

power, suited to the expression of his original think- 
ing, bold, vigorous, and glowing with all the lustre of 
pointed antithesis. But the brilliancy is cold, and the 
ornaments are much too florid and overcharged for a 
graceful effect. When to these minor blemishes we 
add the graver one of an obliquity of judgment, pro- 
duced by inveterate political and religious prejudice, 
which has thrown a shadow over some of the brightest 
characters subjected to his pencil, we have summed up 
a fair amount of critical deficiencies. With all this, 
there is no one of the works of this great and good 
man in which he has displayed more of the strength 
of his mighty intellect, shown a more pure and mascu- 
line morality, more sound principles of criticism in the 
abstract, more acute delineation of character, and more 
gorgeous splendor of diction. His defects, however, 
such as they are, must prevent his maintaining with pos- 
terity that undisputed dictatorship in criticism which 
was conceded to him in his own day. We must do 
justice to his errors as well as to his excellences, in 
order that we may do justice to the characters which 
have come under his censure. And we must admit 
that his work, however admirable as a gallery of splen- 
did portraits, is inadequate to convey any thing like a 
complete or impartial view of English poetry. 

The English have made but slender contributions to 
the history of foreign literatures. The most important, 
probably, are Roscoe's works, in which literary criti- 
cism, though but a subordinate feature, is the most 
valuable part of the composition. As to any thing 
like a general survey of this department, they are 
wholly deficient. The deficiency, indeed, is likely to 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 231 

be supplied, to a certain extent, by the work of Mr. 
Hallam, now in progress of publication, the first vol- 
ume of which — the only one which has yet issued from 
the press — gives evidence of the same curious erudi- 
tion, acuteness, honest impartiality, and energy of dic- 
tion which distinguish the other writings of this emi- 
nent scholar. But the extent of his work, limited to 
four volumes, precludes any thing more than a survey 
of the most prominent features of the vast subject he 
has undertaken. 

The Continental nations, under serious discourage- 
ments, too, have been much more active than the 
British in this field. The Spaniards can boast a gen- 
eral history of letters, extending to more than twenty 
volumes in length, and compiled with sufficient impar- 
tiality. The Italians have several such. Yet these 
are the lands of the Inquisition, where reason is hood- 
winked and the honest utterance of opinion has been 
recompensed by persecution, exile, and the stake. How 
can such a people estimate the character of composi- 
tions which, produced under happier institutions, are 
instinct with the spirit of freedom ! How can they 
make allowance for the manifold eccentricities of a lit- 
erature where thought is allowed to expatiate in all the 
independence of individual caprice ! How can they 
possibly, trained to pay such nice deference to outward 
finish and mere verbal elegance, have any sympathy 
with the rough and homely beauties which emanate 
from the people and are addressed to the people ? 

The French, nurtured under freer forms of govern- 
ment, have contrived to come under a system of liter- 
ary laws scarcely less severe. Their first great dramatic 



232 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

production gave rise to a scheme of critical legislation 
which has continued ever since to press on the genius 
of the nation in all the higher walks of poetic art. 
Amid all the mutations of state, the tone of criticism 
has remained essentially the same to the present cen- 
tury, when, indeed, the boiling passions and higher 
excitements of a revolutionary age have made the 
classic models on which their literature was cast appear 
somewhat too frigid, and a warmer coloring has been 
sought by an infusion of English sentiment. But this 
mixture, or rather confusion, of styles, neither French 
nor English, seems to rest on no settled principles, and 
is, probably, too alien to the genius of the people to 
continue permanent. 

The French, forming themselves early on a foreign 
and antique model, were necessarily driven to rules, as 
a substitute for those natural promptings which have 
directed the course of other modern nations in the 
career of letters. Such rules, of course, while assimi- 
lating them to antiquity, drew them aside from sym- 
pathy with their own contemporaries. How can they, 
thus formed on an artificial system, enter into the spirit 
of other literatures so uncongenial with their own ? 

That the French continued subject to such a system, 
with little change to the present age, is evinced by the 
example of Voltaire, a writer whose lawless ridicule, 

" like the wind, 
Blew where it listed, laying all things prone," 

but whose revolutionary spirit made no serious changes 
in the principles of the national criticism. Indeed, 
his commentaries on Corneille furnish evidence of a 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



2 33 



willingness to contract still closer the range of the 
poet, and to define more accurately the laws by which 
his movements were to be controlled. Voltaire's his- 
tory affords an evidence of the truth of the Horatian 
maxim, " naturam expellas" etc. In his younger days 
he passed some time, as is well known, in England, 
and contracted there a certain relish for the strange 
models which came under his observation. On his 
return he made many attempts to introduce the foreign 
school with which he had become acquainted to his 
own countrymen. His vanity was gratified by detect- 
ing the latent beauties of his barbarian neighbors and 
by being the first to point them out to his countrymen. 
It associated him with names venerated on the other 
side of the Channel, and at home transferred a part of 
their glory to himself. Indeed, he was not backward 
in transferring as much as he could of it, by borrowing 
on his own account, where he could venture, manibus 
ftlenis, and with very little acknowledgment. The 
French at length became so far reconciled to the mon- 
strosities of their neighbors that a regular translation 
of Shakspeare, the lord of the British Pandemonium, 
was executed by Letourneur, a scholar of no great 
merit; but the work was well received. Voltaire, the 
veteran, in his solitude of Ferney, was roused, by the 
applause bestowed on the English poet in his Parisian 
costume, to a sense of his own imprudence. He saw, 
in imagination, the altars which had been raised to 
him, as well as to the other master-spirits of the na- 
tional drama, in a fair way to be overturned in order 
to make room for an idol of his own importation. 
" Have you seen," he writes, speaking of Letourneur' s 

20* 



234 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



version, "his abominable trash? Will you endure the 
affront put upon France by it ? There are no epithets 
bad enough, nor fool's-caps, nor pillories enough in 
all France for such a scoundrel. The blood tingles in 
my old veins in speaking of him. What is the most 
dreadful part of the affair is, the monster has his party 
in France; and, to add to my shame and consterna- 
tion, it was I who first sounded the praises of this Shak- 
speare, — I who first showed the pearls, picked here and 
there, from his overgrown dung-heap. Little did I 
anticipate that I was helping to trample under foot, at 
some future day, the laurels of Racine and Corneille 
to adorn the brows of a barbarous player, — this drunk- 
ard of a Shakspeare." Not content with this expecto- 
ration of his bile, the old poet transmitted a formal 
letter of remonstrance to D'Alembert, which was read 
publicly, as designed, at a regular seance of the Acad- 
emy. The document, after expatiating at length on 
the blunders, vulgarities, and indecencies of the Eng- 
lish bard, concludes with this appeal to the critical 
body he was addressing : " Paint to yourselves, gentle- 
men, Louis the Fourteenth in his gallery at Versailles, 
surrounded by his brilliant court : a tatterdemalion 
advances, covered with rags, and proposes to the assem- 
bly to abandon the tragedies of Racine for a mounte- 
bank, full of grimaces, with nothing but a lucky hit, 
now and then, to redeem them." 

At a later period, Ducis, the successor of Voltaire, 
if we remember right, in the Academy, a writer of far 
superior merit to Letourneur, did the British bard into 
much better French than his predecessor ; though 
Ducis, as he takes care to acquaint us, "did his best 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



2 35 



to efface those startling impressions of horror which 
would have damned his author in the polished theatres 
of Paris !" Voltaire need not have taken the affair so 
much to heart. Shakspeare, reduced within the com- 
pass, as much as possible, of the rules, with all his 
eccentricities and peculiarities — all that made him 
English, in fact — smoothed away, may be tolerated, 
and to a certain extent countenanced, in the "pol- 
ished theatres of Paris." But this is not 

" Shakspeare, Nature s child, 
Warbling his native wood-notes wild." 

The Germans are just the antipodes of their French 
neighbors. Coming late on the arena of modern litera- 
ture, they would seem to be particularly qualified for 
excelling in criticism by the variety of styles and 
models for their study supplied by other nations. 
They have, accordingly, done wonders in this depart- 
ment, and have extended their critical wand over the 
remotest regions, dispelling the mists of old prejudice, 
and throwing the light of learning on what before was 
dark and inexplicable. They certainly are entitled to 
the credit of a singularly cosmopolitan power of divest- 
ing themselves of local and national prejudice. No 
nation has done so much to lay the foundations of that 
reconciling spirit of criticis n which, instead of con- 
demning a difference of taste in different nations as a 
departure from it, seeks to explain such discrepancies 
by the peculiar circumstances of the nation, and thus 
from the elements of discord, as it were, to build up a 
universal and harmonious S)'stem. The exclusive and 
unfavorable views entertained by some of their later 



236 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

critics respecting the French literature, indeed, into 
which they have been urged, no doubt, by a desire to 
counteract the servile deference shown to that literature 
by their countrymen of the preceding age, forms an 
important exception to their usual candor. 

As general critics, however, the Germans are open 
to grave objections. The very circumstances of their 
situation, so favorable, as we have said, to the forma- 
tion of a liberal criticism, have encouraged the taste 
for theories and for system-building, always unpro- 
pitious to truth. Whoever broaches a theory has a 
hard battle to fight with conscience. If the theory 
cannot conform to the facts, so much the worse for the 
facts, as some wag has said ; they must, at all events, 
conform to the theory. The Germans have put together 
hypotheses with the facility with which children con- 
struct card houses, and many of them bid fair to last 
as long. They show more industry in accumulating 
materials than taste or discretion in their arrangement. 
They carry their fantastic imagination beyond the legit- 
imate province of the muse into the sober fields of 
criticism. Their philosophical systems, curiously and 
elaborately devised, with much ancient lore and solemn 
imaginings, may remind one of some of those vener- 
able English cathedrals where the magnificent and 
mysterious Gothic is blended with the clumsy Saxon. 
The effect, on the whole, is grand, but grotesque 
withal. 

The Germans are too often sadly wanting in dis- 
cretion, or, in vulgar parlance, taste. They are per- 
petually overleaping the modesty of nature. They are 
possessed by a cold-blooded enthusiasm, if we may say 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 237 

so, — since it seems to come rather from the head than 
the heart, — which spurs them on over the plainest 
barriers of common sense, until even the right becomes 
the wrong. A striking example of these defects is 
furnished by the dramatic critic Schlegel, whose "Lec- 
tures" are, or may be, familiar to every reader, since 
they have been reprinted in the English version in this 
country. No critic, not even a native, has thrown 
such a flood of light on the characteristics of the sweet 
bard of Avon. He has made himself so intimately 
acquainted with the peculiar circumstances of the poet's 
age and country that he has been enabled to speculate 
on his productions as those of a contemporary. In 
this way he has furnished a key to the mysteries of his 
composition, has reduced what seemed anomalous to 
system, and has supplied Shakspeare's own countrymen 
with new arguments for vindicating the spontaneous 
suggestions of feeling on strictly philosophical princi- 
ples. Not content with this important service, he, as 
usual, pushes his argument to extremes, vindicates ob- 
vious blemishes as necessary parts of a system, and 
calls on us to admire, in contradiction to the most 
ordinary principles of taste and common sense. Thus, 
for example, speaking of Shakspeare's notorious blun- 
ders in geography and chronology, he coolly tells us, 
" I undertake to prove that Shakspeare's anachronisms 
are, for the most part, committed purposely and after 
great consideration." In the same vein, speaking of 
the poet's villanous puns and quibbles, which, to his 
shame, or, rather, that of his age, so often bespangle 
with tawdry brilliancy the majestic robe of the Muse, 
he assures us that "the poet here probably, as every- 



238 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

where else, has followed principles which will bear a 
strict examination." But the intrepidity of criticism 
never went farther than in the conclusion of this same 
analysis, where he unhesitatingly assigns several apocry- 
phal plays to Shakspeare, gravely informing us that 
the last three, "Sir John Oldcastle," "A Yorkshire 
Tragedy," and "Thomas Lord Cromwell," of which 
the English critics speak with unreserved contempt, 
"are not only unquestionably Shakspeare's, but, in 
his judgment, rank among the best and ripest of his 
works !" The old bard, could he raise his head from 
the tomb where none might disturb his bones, would 
exclaim, we imagine, " Non tali auxilio /" 

It shows a tolerable degree of assurance in a critic 
thus to dogmatize on nice questions of verbal resem- 
blance which have so long baffled the natives of the 
country, who, on such questions, obviously can be the 
only competent judges. It furnishes a striking example 
of the want of discretion noticeable in so many of the 
German scholars. With all these defects, however, it 
cannot be denied that they have widely extended the 
limits of rational criticism, and, by their copious stores 
of erudition, furnished the student with facilities for 
attaining the best points of view for a comprehensive 
survey of both ancient and modern literature. 

The English have had advantages, on the whole, 
greater than those of any other people for perfecting 
the science of general criticism. They have had no 
academies to bind the wing of genius to the earth by 
their thousand wire-drawn subtleties. No Inquisition 
has placed its burning seal upon the lip and thrown 
its dark shadow over the recesses of the soul. They 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 239 

have enjoyed the inestimable privilege of thinking 
what they pleased, and of uttering what they thought. 
Their minds, trained to independence, have had no 
occasion to shrink from encountering any topic, and 
have acquired a masculine confidence indispensable to 
a calm appreciation of the mighty and widely diversi- 
fied productions of genius, as unfolded under the influ- 
ences of as widely-diversified institutions and national 
character. Their own literature, with chameleon-like 
delicacy, has reflected all the various aspects of the na- 
tion in the successive stages of its history. The rough, 
romantic beauties and gorgeous pageantry of the Eliza- 
bethan age, the stern, sublime enthusiasm of the Com- 
monwealth, the cold brilliancy of Queen Anne, and 
the tumultuous movements and ardent sensibilities of 
the present generation, all have been reflected, as in a 
mirror, in the current of English literature as it has 
flowed down through the lapse of ages. It is easy to 
understand what advantages this cultivation of all these 
different styles of composition at home must give the 
critic in divesting himself of narrow and local preju- 
dice, and in appreciating the genius of foreign litera- 
tures, in each of which some one or other of these 
different styles has found favor. To this must be 
added the advantages derived from the structure of 
the English language itself, which, compounded of the 
Teutonic and the Latin, offers facilities for a compre- 
hension of other literatures not afforded by those lan- 
guages, as the German and the Italian, for instance, 
almost exclusively derived from but one of them. 

With all this, the English, as we have remarked, 
have made fewer direct contributions to general lite: - 



240 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

ary criticism than the Continental nations, unless, 
indeed, we take into the account the periodical criti- 
cism, which has covered the whole field with a light 
skirmishing, very unlike any systematic plan of opera- 
tions. The good effect of this guerilla warfare may 
well be doubted. Most of these critics for the nonce 
(and we certainly are competent judges on this point) 
come to their work with little previous preparation. 
Their attention has been habitually called, for the most 
part, in other directions, and they throw off an acci- 
dental essay in the brief intervals of other occupation. 
Hence their views are necessarily often superficial, and 
sometimes contradictory, as may be seen from turning 
over the leaves of any journal where literary topics 
are widely discussed ; for, whatever consistency may 
be demanded in politics or religion, very free scope is 
offered, even in the same journal, to literary specula- 
tion. Even when the article may have been the fruit 
of a mind ripened by study and meditation on con- 
genial topics, it too often exhibits only the partial view 
suggested by the particular and limited direction of the 
author's thoughts in this instance. Truth is not much 
served by this irregular process ; and the general illu- 
mination indispensable to a full and fair survey of the 
whole ground can never be supplied from such scat- 
tered and capricious gleams thrown over it at random. 
Another obstacle to a right result is founded in the 
very constitution of review-writing. Miscellaneous in 
its range of topics, and addressed to a miscellaneous 
class of readers, its chief reliance for success in com- 
petition with the thousand novelties of the day is in 
the temporary interest it can excite. Instead of a con- 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 241 

scientious discussion and cautious examination of the 
matter in hand, we too often find an attempt to stimu- 
late the popular appetite by piquant sallies of wit, by 
caustic sarcasm, or by a pert, dashing confidence, that 
cuts the knot it cannot readily unloose. Then, again, 
the spirit of periodical criticism would seem to be 
little favorable to perfect impartiality. The critic, 
shrouded in his secret tribunal, too often demeans him- 
self like a stern inquisitor, whose business is rather to 
convict than to examine. Criticism is directed to scent 
out blemishes instead of beauties. "Judex damnatur 
cum nocens absolvitor" is the bloody motto of a well- 
known British periodical, which, under this piratical 
flag, has sent a broadside into many a gallant bark that 
deserved better at its hands. 

When we combine with all this the spirit of patriot- 
ism, or, what passes for such with nine-tenths of the 
world, the spirit of national vanity, we shall find 
abundant motives for a deviation from a just, impartial 
estimate of foreign literatures. And if we turn over 
the pages of the best-conducted English journals, we 
shall probably find ample evidence of the various 
causes we have enumerated. We shall find, amid 
abundance of shrewd and sarcastic observation, smart 
skirmish of wit, and clever antithesis, a very small in- 
fusion of sober, dispassionate criticism ; the criticism 
founded on patient study and on strictly philosophical 
principles ; the criticism on which one can safely rely 
as the criterion of good taste, and which, however 
tame it may appear to the jaded appetite of the liter- 
ary lounger, is the only one that will attract the eye 
of posterity. 

l 21 



242 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



The work named at the head of our article will, we 
suspect, notwithstanding the author's brilliant reputa- 
tion, never meet this same eye of posterity. Though 
purporting to be, in its main design, an Essay on Eng- 
lish Literature, it is, in fact, a multifarious compound 
of as many ingredients as entered into the witches' 
caldron, to say nothing of a gallery of portraits of 
dead and living, among the latter of whom M. de 
Chateaubriand himself is not the least conspicuous. 
" I have treated of every thing," he says, truly enough, 
in his preface, "the Present, the Past, the Future." 
The parts are put together in the most grotesque and 
disorderly manner, with some striking coincidences, 
occasionally, of characters and situations, and some 
facts not familiar to every reader. The most unpleas- 
ant feature in the book is the doleful lamentation of the 
author over the evil times on which he has fallen. He 
has, indeed, lived somewhat beyond his time, which 
was that of Charles the Tenth, of pious memory, — the 
good old time of apostolicals and absolutists, which 
will not be likely to revisit France again very soon. 
Indeed, our unfortunate author reminds one of some 
weather-beaten hulk which the tide has left high and 
dry on the strand, and whose signals of distress are 
little heeded by the rest of the convoy, which have 
trimmed their sails more dexterously and sweep mer- 
rily on before the breeze. The present work affords 
glimpses, occasionally, of the author's happier style, 
which has so often fascinated us in his earlier produc- 
tions. On the whole, however, it will add little to 
his reputation, nor, probably, much subtract from it. 
When a man has sent forth a score or two of octavos 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 243 

into the world, and as good as some of M. de Chateau- 
briand's, he can bear up under a poor one now and 
then. This is not the first indifferent work laid at his 
door, and, as he promises to keep the field for some 
time longer, it will probably not be the last. 

We pass over the first half of the first volume, to 
come to the Reformation, the point of departure, as 
it were, for modern civilization. Our author's views in 
relation to it, as we might anticipate, are not precisely 
those we should entertain. 

"In a religious point of view," he says, "the Ref- 
ormation is leading insensibly to indifference, or the 
complete absence of fai th : the reason is, that the 
independence of the mind terminates in two gulfs, 
doubt and incredulity. 

"By a very natural reaction, the Reformation, at its 
birth, rekindled the dying flame of Catholic fanati- 
cism. It may thus be regarded as the indirect cause 
of the massacre of St. Bartholomew, the disturbances 
of the League, the assassination of Henry the Fourth, 
the murders in Ireland, and of the revocation of the 
Edict of Nantes, and the dragonnades" / — Vol. i. p. 

193- 

As to the tendency of the Reformation towards 

doubt and incredulity, we know that free inquiry, con- 
tinually presenting new views as the sphere of observa- 
tion is enlarged, may unsettle old principles without 
establishing any fixed ones in their place, or, in other 
words, lead to skepticism ; but we doubt if this hap- 
pens more frequently than under the opposite system, 
inculcated by the Romish Church, which, by precluding 
examination, excludes the only ground of rational be- 



244 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

lief. At all events, skepticism in the former case is 
much more remediable than in the latter; since the 
subject of it, by pursuing his inquiries, will, it is to 
be hoped, as truth is mighty, arrive at last at a right 
result ; while the Romanist, inhibited from such in- 
quiry, has no remedy. The ingenious author of 
" Doblado's Letters from Spain" has painted in the 
most affecting colors the state of such a mind, which, 
declining to take its creed at the bidding of another, 
is lost in a labyrinth of doubt without a clue to guide 
it. As to charging on the Reformation the various 
enormities with which the above extract concludes, 
the idea is certainly new. It is, in fact, making the 
Protestants guilty of their own persecution, and Henry 
the Fourth of his own assassination ; quite an original 
view of the subject, which, as far as we know, has 
hitherto escaped the attention of historians. 

A few pages farther, and we find the following in- 
formation respecting the state of Catholicism in our 
own country : 

"Maryland, a Catholic and very populous state, 
made common cause with the others, and now most 
of the Western States are Catholic. The progress of 
this communion in the United States of America 
exceeds belief. There it has been invigorated in its 
evangelical aliment, popular liberty, while other com- 
munions decline in profound indifference.'''' — Vol. i. 
p. 201. 

We were not aware of this state of things. We did 
indeed know that the Roman Church had increased 
much of late years, especially in the Valley of the 
Mississippi ; but so have other communions, as the 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 245 

Methodist and Baptist, for example, the latter of which 
comprehends five times as many disciples as the Ro- 
man Catholic. As to the population of the latter in 
the West, the whole number of Catholics in the Union 
does not amount, probably, to three-fourths of the 
number of inhabitants in the single Western State of 
Ohio. The truth is, that in a country where there is 
no established or favored sect, and where the clergy 
depend on voluntary contribution for their support, 
there must be constant efforts at proselytism, and a 
mutation of religious opinion, according to the con- 
victions, or fancied convictions, of the converts. What 
one denomination gains another loses, till, roused in 
its turn by its rival, new efforts are made to retrieve 
its position, and the equilibrium is restored. In the 
mean time, the population of the whole country goes 
forward with giant strides, and each sect boasts, and 
boasts with truth, of the hourly augmentation of its 
numbers. Those of the Roman Catholics are swelled, 
moreover, by a considerable addition from emigration, 
many Of the poor foreigners, especially the Irish, being 
of that persuasion. But this is no ground of triumph, 
as it infers no increase to the sum of Catholicism, since 
what is thus gained in the New World is lost in the Old. 

Our author pronounces the Reformation hostile to 
the arts, poetry, eloquence, elegant literature, and even 
the spirit of military heroism. But hear his own words : 

"The Reformation, imbued with the spirit of its 
founder, declared itself hostile to the arts. It sacked 
tombs, churches, and monuments, and made in France 
and England heaps of ruins.". . . . 

"The beautiful in literature will be found to exist 

21* 



246 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

in a greater or less degree, in proportion as writers 
have approximated to the genius of the Roman 
Church." ... 

" If the Reformation restricted genius in poetry, 
eloquence, and the arts, it also checked heroism in 
war, for heroism is imagination in the military order." 
— Vol. i. pp. 194-207. 

This is a sweeping denunciation, and, as far as the 
arts of design are intended, may probably be defended. 
The Romish worship, its stately ritual and gorgeous 
ceremonies, the throng of numbers assisting, in one 
form or another, at the service, all required spacious 
and magnificent edifices, with the rich accessories of 
sculpture and painting, and music also, to give full 
effect to the spectacle. Never was there a religion 
which addressed itself more directly to the senses. 
And, fortunately for it, the immense power and rev- 
enues of its ministers enabled them to meet its exorbi- 
tant demands. On so splendid a theatre, and under 
such patronage, the arts were called into life in modern 
Europe, and most of all in that spot which represented 
the capital of Christendom. It was there, amid the 
pomp and luxury of religion, that those beautiful 
structures rose, with those exquisite creations of the 
chisel and the pencil, which embodied in themselves 
all the elements of ideal beauty. 

But, independently of these external circumstances, 
the spirit of Catholicism was eminently favorable to 
the artist. Shut out from free inquiry — from the 
Scriptures themselves — and compelled to receive the 
dogmas of his teachers upon trust, the road to con- 
viction lay less through the understanding than the 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



247 



heart. The heart was to be moved, the affections and 
sympathies to be stirred, as well as the senses to be 
dazzled. This was the machinery by which alone 
could an effectual devotion to the faith be maintained 
in an ignorant people. It was not, therefore, Christ as 
a teacher delivering lessons of practical wisdom and 
morality that was brought before the eye, but Christ 
filling the offices of human sympathy, ministering to 
the poor and sorrowing, giving eyes to the blind, 
health to the sick, and life to the dead. It was Christ 
suffering under persecution, crowned with thorns, lacer- 
ated with stripes, dying on the cross. These sorrows 
and sufferings were understood by the dullest soul, and 
told more than a thousand homilies. So with the 
Virgin. It was not that sainted mother of the Saviour 
whom Protestants venerate but do not worship ; it was 
the Mother of God, and entitled, like him, £0 adora- 
tion. It was a woman, and, as such, the object of 
those romantic feelings which would profane the ser- 
vice of the Deity, but which are not the less touching 
as being in accordance with human sympathies. The 
respect for the Virgin, indeed, partook of that which a 
Catholic might feel for his tutelar saint and his mistress 
combined. Orders of chivalry were dedicated to her 
service ; and her shrine was piled with more offerings 
and frequented by more pilgrimages than the altars of 
the Deity himself. Thus, feelings of love, adoration, 
and romantic honor, strangely blended, threw a halo 
of poetic glory around their object, making it the most 
exalted theme for the study of the artist. What wonder 
that this subject should have called forth the noblest 
inspirations of his genius? What wonder that an artist 



248 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

like Raphael should have found in the simple portraiture 
of a woman and a child the materials for immortality ? 

It was something like a kindred state of feeling which 
called into being the arts of ancient Greece, when her 
mythology was comparatively fresh, and faith was easy, 
— when the legends of the past, familiar as Scripture 
story at a later day, gave a real existence to the beings 
of fancy, and the artist, embodying these in forms of 
visible beauty, but finished the work which the poet had 
begun. 

The Reformation brought other trains of ideas, and 
with them other influences on the arts, than those 
of Catholicism. Its first movements were decidedly 
hostile, since the works of art with which the temples 
were adorned, being associated with the religion itself, 
became odious as the symbols of idolatry. But the 
spirit of the Reformation gave thought a new direction 
even in the cultivation of art. It was no longer sought 
to appeal to the senses by brilliant display, or to waken 
the sensibilities by those superficial emotions which find 
relief in tears. A sterner, deeper feeling was roused. 
The mind was turned within, as it were, to ponder on 
the import of existence and its future destinies ; for 
the chains were withdrawn from the soul, and it was 
permitted to wander at large in the regions of specula- 
tion. Reason took the place of sentiment, — the useful 
of the merely ornamental. Facts were substituted for 
forms, even the ideal forms of beauty. There were to 
be no more Michael Angelos and Raphaels ; no glorious 
Gothic temples which consumed generations in their 
building. The sublime and the beautiful were not the 
first objects proposed by the artist. He sought truth, — 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



249 



fidelity to nature. He studied the characters of his 
species as well as the forms of imaginary perfection. 
He portrayed life as developed in its thousand pecu- 
liarities before his own eyes, and the ideal gave way to 
the natural. In this way, new schools of painting, like 
that of Hogarth, for example, arose, which, however 
inferior in those great properties for which we must 
admire the masterpieces of Italian art, had a signifi- 
cance and philosophic depth which furnished quite as 
much matter for study and meditation. 

A similar tendency was observable in poetry, elo- 
quence, and works of elegant literature. The influence 
of the Reformation here was undoubtedly favorable, 
whatever it may have been on the arts. How could it 
be otherwise on literature, the written expression of 
thought, in which no grace of visible forms and pro- 
portions, no skill of mechanical execution, can cheat 
the eye with the vain semblance of genius? But it was 
not until the warm breath of the Reformation had dis- 
solved the icy fetters which had so long held the spirit 
of man in bondage that the genial current of the soul 
was permitted to flow, that the gates of reason were 
unbarred, and the mind was permitted to taste of the 
tree of knowledge, forbidden tree no longer. Where 
was the scope for eloquence when thought was stifled 
in the very sanctuary of the heart ? for out of the ful- 
ness of the heart the mouth speaketh. 

There might, indeed, be an elaborate attention to 
the outward forms of expression, an exquisite finish of 
verbal arrangement, the dress and garniture of thought. 
And, in fact, the Catholic nations have surpassed the 
Protestant in attention to verbal elegance and the 

L* 



250 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

soft music of numbers, to nice rhetorical artifice and 
brilliancy of composition. The poetry of Italy and 
the prose of France bear ample evidence how much 
time and talent have been expended on this beauty of 
outward form, the rich vehicle of thought. But where 
shall we find the powerful reasoning, various knowl- 
edge, and fearless energy of diction which stamp the 
oratory of Protestant England and America ? In 
France, indeed, where prose has received a higher 
polish and classic elegance than in any other country, 
pulpit eloquence has reached an uncommon degree of 
excellence ; for, though much was excluded, the ave- 
nues to the heart, as with the painter and the sculptor, 
were still left open to the orator. If there has been a 
deficiency in this respect in the English Church, which 
all will not admit, it arises probably from the fact that 
the mind, unrestricted, has been occupied with reason- 
ing rather than rhetoric, and sought to clear away old 
prejudices and establish new truths, instead of waken- 
ing a transient sensibility or dazzling the imagination 
with poetic flights of eloquence. That it is the fault 
of the preacher, at all events, and not of Protestantism, 
is shown by a striking example under our own eyes, 
that of our distinguished countryman Dr. Channing, 
whose style is irradiated with all the splendors of a 
glowing imagination, showing, as powerfully as any 
other example, probably, in English prose, of what 
melody and compass the language is capable under the 
touch of genius instinct with genuine enthusiasm. Not 
that we would recommend this style, grand and beau- 
tiful as it is, for imitation. We think we have seen the 
ill effects of this already in more than one instance. 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



251 



In fact, no style should be held up as a model for imi- 
tation. Dr. Johnson tells us, in one of those oracular 
passages somewhat threadbare now, that " whoever 
wishes to attain an English style, familiar but not 
coarse, and elegant but not ostentatious, must give his 
days and nights to the volumes of Addison." With 
all deference to the great critic, who, by the formal 
cut of the sentence just quoted, shows that he did not 
care to follow his own prescription, we think other- 
wise. Whoever would write a good English style, we 
should say, should acquaint himself with the mysteries 
of the language as revealed in the writings of the best 
masters, but should form his own style on nobody but 
himself. Every man, at least every man with a spark 
of originality in his composition, has his own peculiar 
way of thinking, and, to give it effect, it must find its 
way out in its own peculiar language. Indeed, it is 
impossible to separate language from thought in that 
delicate blending of both which is called style; at 
least, it is impossible to produce the same effect with 
the original by any copy, however literal. We may 
imitate the structure of a sentence, but the ideas which 
gave it its peculiar propriety we cannot imitate. The 
forms of expression that suit one man's train of think- 
ing no more suit another's than one man's clothes will 
suit another. They will be sure to be either too large 
or too small, or, at all events, not to make what gen- 
tlemen of the needle call a good fit. If the party 
chances, as is generally the case, to be rather under 
size, and the model is over size, this will only expose 
his own littleness the more. There is no case more in 
point than that afforded by Dr. Johnson himself. His 



252 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



brilliant style has been the ambition of every school- 
boy, and of some children of larger growth, since the 
days of the Rambler. But the nearer they come to it 
the worse. The beautiful is turned into the fantastic, 
and the sublime into the ridiculous. The most curious 
example of this within our recollection is the case of 
Dr. Symmons, the English editor of Milton's prose 
writings, and the biographer of the poet. The little 
doctor has maintained throughout his ponderous vol- 
ume a most exact imitation of the great doctor, his 
sesquipedalian words, and florid rotundity of period. 
With all this cumbrous load of brave finery on his 
back, swelled to twice his original dimensions, he 
looks for all the world, as he is, like a mere bag of 
wind, — a scarecrow, to admonish others of the folly 
of similar depredations. 

But to return. The influence of the Reformation on 
elegant literature was never more visible than in the 
first great English school of poets, which came soon 
after it, at the close of the sixteenth century. The 
writers of that period displayed a courage, originality, 
and truth highly characteristic of the new revolution, 
which had been introduced by breaking down the old 
landmarks of opinion and giving unbounded range to 
speculation and inquiry. The first great poet, Spenser, 
adopted the same vehicle of imagination with the Ital- 
ian bards of chivalry, the romantic epic ; but, instead 
of making it, like them, a mere revel of fancy, with 
no farther object than to delight the reader by bril- 
liant combinations, he moralized his song, and gave it 
a deeper and more solemn import by the mysteries of 
Allegory, which, however prejudicial to its effect as a 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



2 53 



work of art, showed a mind too intent on serious 
thoughts and inquiries itself to be content with the 
dazzling but impotent coruscations of genius, that 
serve no other end than that of amusement. 

In the same manner, Shakspeare and the other dra- 
matic writers of the time, instead of adopting the formal 
rules recognized afterwards by the French writers, their 
long rhetorical flourishes, their exaggerated models of 
character, and ideal forms, went freely and fearlessly 
into all the varieties of human nature, the secret depths 
of the soul, touching on all the diversified interests of 
humanity, — for he might touch on all without fear of 
persecution, — and thus making his productions a store- 
house of philosophy, of lessons of practical wisdom, 
deep, yet so clear that he who runs may read. 

But the spirit of the Reformation did not descend 
in all its fulness on the Muse till the appearance of 
Milton. That great poet was in heart as thoroughly 
a Reformer, and in doctrine much more thoroughly 
so than Luther himself. Indignant at every effort to 
crush the spirit, and to cheat it, in his own words, 
"of that liberty which rarefies and enlightens it like 
the influence of heaven," he proclaimed the rights 
of man as a rational, immortal being, undismayed by 
menace and obloquy, amid a generation of servile and 
unprincipled sycophants. The blindness which ex- 
cluded him from the things of earth opened to him 
more glorious and spiritualized conceptions of heaven, 
and aided him in exhibiting the full influence of those 
sublime truths which the privilege of free inquiry in 
religious matters had poured upon the mind. His 
Muse was as eminently the child of Protestantism as 

22 



254 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



that of Dante, who resembled him in so many traits of 
character, was of Catholicism. The latter poet, com- 
ing first among the moderns, after the fountains of the 
great deep which had so long overwhelmed the world 
were broken up, displayed in his wonderful composi- 
tion all the elements of modern institutions as distin- 
guished from those of antiquity. He first showed the 
full and peculiar influence of Christianity on literature, 
but it was Christianity under the form of Catholicism. 
His subject, spiritual in its design, like Milton's, was 
sustained by all the auxiliaries of a visible and mate- 
rial existence. His passage through the infernal abyss 
is a series of tragic pictures of human woe, suggesting 
greater refinements of cruelty than were ever imagined 
by a heathen poet. Amid all the various forms of 
mortal anguish, we look in vain for the mind as a means 
of torture. In like manner, in ascending the scale of 
celestial being, we pass through a succession of bril- 
liant fetes, made up of light, music, and motion, in- 
creasing in splendor and velocity, till all are lost and 
confounded in the glories of the Deity. Even the 
pencil of the great master, dipped in these gorgeous 
tints of imagination, does not shrink from the attempt 
to portray the outlines of Deity itself. In this he 
aspired to what many of his countrymen in the sister 
arts of design have since attempted, and, like him, 
have failed ; for who can hope to give form to the In- 
finite? In the same false style Dante personifies the 
spirits of evil, including Satan himself. Much was 
doubtless owing to the age, though much, also, must 
be referred to the genius of Catholicism, which, ap- 
pealing to the senses, has a tendency to materialize the 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



255 



spiritual, as Protestantism, with deeper reflection, aims 
to spiritualize the material. Thus Milton, in treading 
similar ground, borrows his illustrations from intel- 
lectual sources, conveys the image of the Almighty by 
his attributes, and, in the frequent portraiture which 
he introduces of Satan, suggests only vague concep- 
tions of form, the faint outlines of matter, as it were, 
stretching vast over many a rood, but towering sub- 
lime by the unconquerable energy of will, — the fit 
representative of the principle of evil. Indeed, Milton 
has scarcely any thing of what may be called scenic 
decorations to produce a certain stage effect. His 
actors are few, and his action nothing. It is only by 
their intellectual and moral relations — by giving full 
scope to the 

" Cherub Contemplation — 
He that soars on golden wing, 
Guiding the fiery-wheeled throne," 

that he has prepared for us visions of celestial beauty 
and grandeur which never fade from our souls. 

In the dialogue with which the two poets have sea- 
soned their poems, we see the action of the oppo- 
site influences we have described. Both give vent to 
metaphysical disquisition, of learned sound, and much 
greater length than the reader would desire ; but in 
Milton it is the free discussion of a mind trained to 
wrestle boldly on abstrusest points of metaphysical 
theology, while Dante follows in the same old barren 
footsteps which had been trodden by the schoolmen. 
Both writers were singularly bold and independent. 
Dante asserted that liberty which should belong to 
the citizen of every free state, — that civil liberty 



256 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

which had been sacrificed in his own country by 
the spirit of faction. But Milton claimed a higher 
freedom, — a freedom of thinking and of giving utter- 
ance to thought, uncontrolled by human authority. 
He had fallen on evil times ; but he had a generous 
confidence that his voice would reach to posterity and 
would be a guide and a light to the coming genera- 
tions. And truly has it proved so ; for in his writings 
we find the germs of many of the boasted discoveries 
of our own day in government and education, so that 
he may be fairly considered as the morning star of that 
higher civilization which distinguishes our happier era. 
Milton's poetical writings do not seem, however, to 
have been held in that neglect by his contemporaries 
which is commonly supposed. He had attracted too 
much attention as a political controversialist, was too 
much feared for his talents, as well as hated for his 
principles, to allow any thing which fell from his pen 
to pass unnoticed. Although the profits went to others, 
he lived to see a second edition of " Paradise Lost," 
and this was more than was to have been fairly antici- 
pated of a composition of this nature, however well 
executed, falling on such times. Indeed, its sale was 
no evidence that its merits were comprehended, and 
may be referred to the general reputation of its au- 
thor ; for we find so accomplished a critic as Sir Wil- 
liam Temple, some years later, omitting the name of 
Milton in his roll of writers who have done honor to 
modern literature, a circumstance which may perhaps 
be imputed to that reverence for the ancients which 
blinded Sir William to the merits of their successors. 
How could Milton be understood in his own genera- 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



257 



tion, in the grovelling, sensual court of Charles the 
Second ? How could the dull eyes so long fastened on 
the earth endure the blaze of his inspired genius? It 
was not till time had removed him to a distance that 
he could be calmly gazed on and his merits fairly con- 
templated. Addison, as is well known, was the first to 
bring them into popular view, by a beautiful specimen 
of criticism that has permanently connected his name 
with that of his illustrious subject. More than half a 
century later, another great name in English criticism, 
perhaps the greatest in general reputation, Johnson, 
passed sentence of a very different kind on the preten- 
sions of the poet. A production more discreditable 
to the author is not to be found in the whole of his 
voluminous works, — equally discreditable whether re- 
garded in an historical light or as a sample of literary 
criticism. What shall we say of the biographer who, 
in allusion to that affecting passage where the blind old 
bard talks of himself as "in darkness, and with dangers 
compass' d round," can coolly remark that "this dark- 
ness, had his eyes been better employed, might un- 
doubtedly have deserved compassion"? Or what of 
the critic who can say of the most exquisite effusion of 
Doric minstrelsy that our language boasts, " Surely no 
man could have fancied that he read 'Lycidas' with 
pleasure, had he not known the author;" and of " Par- 
adise Lost" itself, that "its perusal is a duty rather 
than a pleasure' ' ? Could a more exact measure be 
afforded than by this single line of the poetic sensi- 
bility of the critic, and his unsuitableness for the office 
he had here assumed? His "Life of Milton" is a 
humiliating testimony of the power of political and 

22' 



258 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

religious prejudices to warp a great and good mind 
from the standard of truth, in the estimation not 
merely of contemporary excellence, but of the great 
of other years, over whose frailties Time might be 
supposed to have drawn his friendly mantle. 

Another half-century has elapsed, and ample justice 
has been rendered to the fame of the poet by two 
elaborate criticisms : the one in the Edinburgh Re- 
view, from the pen of Mr. Macaulay; the other by 
Dr. Channing, in the u Christian Examiner," since 
republished in his own works ; remarkable perform- 
ances, each in the manner highly characteristic of its 
author, and which have contributed, doubtless, to draw 
attention to the prose compositions of their subject, 
as the criticism of Addison did to his poetry. There 
is something gratifying in the circumstance that this 
great advocate of intellectual liberty should have found 
his most able and eloquent expositor among us, whose 
position qualifies us in a peculiar manner for profiting 
by the rich legacy of his genius. It was but discharging 
a debt of gratitude. 

Chateaubriand has much to say about Milton, for 
whose writings, both prose and poetry, notwithstanding 
the difference of their sentiments on almost all points 
of politics and religion, he appears to entertain the 
most sincere reverence. His criticisms are liberal and 
just ; they show a thorough study of his author ; but 
neither the historical facts nor the reflections will 
suggest much that is new on a subject now become 
trite to the English reader. 

We may pass over a good deal of skimble-skamble 
stuff about men and things, which our author may have 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



2 59 



cut out of his commonplace-book, to come to his 
remarks on Sir Walter Scott, whom he does not rate 
so highly as most critics. 

"The illustrious painter of Scotland," he says, 
"seems to me to have created a false class; he has, 
in my opinion, confounded history and romance. 
The novelist has set about writing historical romances, 
and the historian romantic histories." — Vol. ii. p. 306. 

We should have said, on the contrary, that he had 
improved the character of both ; that he had given 
new value to romance by building it on history, and 
new charms to history by embellishing it with the 
graces of romance. 

To be more explicit. The principal historical work 
of Scott is the "Life of Napoleon." It has, unques- 
tionably, many of the faults incident to a dashing style 
of composition, which precluded the possibility of 
compression and arrangement in the best form of 
which the subject was capable. This, in the end, may 
be fatal to the perpetuity of the work, for posterity 
will be much less patient than our own age. He will 
have a much heavier load to carry, inasmuch as he is 
to bear up under all of his own time, and ours too. It 
is very certain, then, some must go by the board ; and 
nine sturdy volumes, which is the amount of Sir Wal- 
ter's English edition, will be somewhat alarming. Had 
he confined himself to half the quantity, there would 
have been no ground for distrust. Every day, nay, 
hour, we see, ay, and feel, the ill effects of this rapid 
style of composition, so usual with the best writers of 
our day. The immediate profits which such writers 
are pretty sure to get, notwithstanding the example of 



260 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

M. Chateaubriand, operate like the dressing improv- 
idently laid on a naturally good soil, forcing out 
noxious weeds in such luxuriance as to check, if not 
absolutely to kill, the more healthful vegetation. 
Quantities of trivial detail find their way into the 
page, mixed up with graver matters. Instead of that 
skilful preparation by which all the avenues verge at 
last to one point, so as to leave a distinct impression — 
an impression of unity — on the reader, he is hurried 
along zigzag, in a thousand directions, or round and 
round, but never, in the cant of the times, "going 
ahead" an inch. He leaves off pretty much where he 
set out, except that his memory may be tolerably well 
stuffed with facts, which, from want of some principle 
of cohesion, will soon drop out of it. He will find 
himself like a traveller who has been riding through a 
fine country, it may be, by moonlight, getting glimpses 
of every thing, but no complete, well-illuminated view 
of the whole (" quale per incertam lunam" etc.), or, 
rather, like the same traveller whizzing along in a 
locomotive so rapidly as to get even a glimpse fairly 
of nothing, instead of making his tour in such a 
manner as would enable him to pause at what was 
worth his attention, to pass by night over the barren 
and uninteresting, and occasionally to rise to such 
elevations as would afford the best points of view for 
commanding the various prospect. 

The romance-writer labors under no such embarrass- 
ments. He may, undoubtedly, precipitate his work, 
so that it may lack proportion, and the nice arrange- 
ment required by the rules which, fifty years ago, would 
have condemned it as a work of art. But the criticism 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 261 

of the present day is not so squeamish, or, to say truth, 
pedantic. It is enough for the writer of fiction if 
he give pleasure; and this, everybody knows, is not 
effected by the strict observance of artificial rules. It 
is of little consequence how the plot is entangled, or 
whether it be untied or cut in order to extricate the 
dra?natis persona. At least, it is of little consequence 
compared with the true delineation of character. The 
story is serviceable only as it affords a means for the 
display of this; and if the novelist but keep up the 
interest of his story and the truth of his characters, we 
easily forgive any dislocations which his light vehicle 
may encounter from too heedless motion. Indeed, 
rapidity of motion may in some sort favor him, keep- 
ing up the glow of his invention, and striking out, as 
he dashes along, sparks of wit and fancy, that give a 
brilliant illumination to his track. But in history there 
must be another kind of process, — a process at once 
slow and laborious. Old parchments are to be ran- 
sacked, charters and musty records to be deciphered, 
and stupid, worm-eaten chroniclers, who had much 
more of passion, frequently, to blind, than good sense 
to guide them, must be sifted and compared. In short, 
a sort of Medea-like process is to be gone through, 
and many an old bone is to be boiled over in the 
caldron before it can come out again clothed in the 
elements of beauty. The dreams of the novelist, — 
the poet of prose, — on the other hand, are beyond the 
reach of art, and the magician calls up the most 
brilliant forms of fancy by a single stroke of his wand. 
Scott, in his History, was relieved in some degree 
from this necessity of studious research by borrowing 



262 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

his theme from contemporary events. It was his duty, 
indeed, to examine evidence carefully and sift out con- 
tradictions and errors. This demanded shrewdness and 
caution, but not much previous preparation and study. 
It demanded, above all, candor ; for it was his busi- 
ness not to make out a case for a client, but to weigh 
both sides, like an impartial judge, before summing up 
the evidence and delivering his conscientious opinion. 
We believe there is no good ground for charging Scott 
with having swerved from this part of his duty. Those 
who expected to see him deify his hero and raise altars 
to his memory were disappointed ; and so were those, 
also, who demanded that the tail and cloven hoof 
should be made to peep out beneath the imperial robe. 
But this proves his impartiality. It would be unfair, 
however, to require the degree of impartiality which is 
to be expected from one removed to a distance from 
the theatre of strife, from those national interests and 
feelings which are so often the disturbing causes of 
historic fairness. An American, no doubt, would have 
been in this respect in a more favorable point of view 
for contemplating the European drama. The ocean, 
stretched between us and the Old World, has the effect 
of time, and extinguishes, or, at least, cools, the hot 
and angry feelings which find their way into every 
man's bosom within the atmosphere of the contest. 
Scott was a Briton, with all the peculiarities of one, — 
at least of a North Briton ; and the future historian 
who gathers materials from his labors will throw these 
national predilections into the scale in determining the 
probable accuracy of his statements. These are not 
greater than might occur to any man, and allowance 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 263 

will always be made for them, on the ground of a gen- 
eral presumption ; so that a greater degree of impar- 
tiality, by leading to false conclusions in this respect, 
would scarcely have served the cause of truth better 
with posterity. An individual who felt his reputation 
compromised may have joined issue on this or that 
charge of inaccuracy; but no such charge has come 
from any of the leading journals in the country, which 
would not have been slow to expose it, and which 
would not, considering the great popularity and, con- 
sequently, influence of the work, have omitted, as they 
did, to notice it at all, had it afforded any obvious 
ground of exception on this score. Where, then, is 
the romance which our author accuses Sir Walter of 
blending with history? 

Scott was, in truth, master of the picturesque. He 
understood, better than any historian since the time 
of Livy, how to dispose his lights and shades so as to 
produce the most striking result. This property of 
romance he had a right to borrow. This talent is par- 
ticularly observable in the animated parts of his story, 
— in his battles, for example. No man ever painted 
those terrible scenes with greater effect. He had a 
natural relish for gunpowder; and his mettle roused, 
like that of the war-horse, at the sound of the trumpet. 
His acquaintance with military science enabled him to 
employ a technical phraseology, just technical enough 
to give a knowing air to his descriptions, without em- 
barrassing the reader by a pedantic display of unintel- 
ligible jargon. This is a talent rare in a civilian. 
Nothing can be finer than many of his battle-pieces 
in his "Life of Bonaparte," unless, indeed, we except 



264 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

one or two in his "History of Scotland," as the fight 
of Bannockburn, for example, in which Burns' s "Scots, 
wha hae" seems to breathe in every line. 

It is when treading on Scottish ground that he 
seems to feel all his strength. "I seem always to 
step more firmly," he said to some one, "when on 
my own native heather." His mind was steeped 
in Scottish lore, and his bosom warmed with a sym- 
pathetic glow for the age of chivalry. Accordingly, 
his delineations of this period, whether in history 
or romance, are unrivalled ; as superior in effect to 
those of most compilers as the richly-stained glass of 
the feudal ages is superior in beauty and brilliancy of 
tints to a modern imitation. If this be borrowing 
something from romance, it is, we repeat, no more 
than what is lawful for the historian, and explains 
the meaning of our assertion that he has improved 
history by the embellishments of fiction. 

Yet, after all, how wide the difference between the 
province of history and of romance, under Scott's own 
hands, may be shown by comparing his account of 
Mary's reign in his "History of Scotland" with the 
same period in the novel of "The Abbot." The his- 
torian must keep the beaten track of events. The 
novelist launches into the illimitable regions of fiction, 
provided only that his historic portraits be true to their 
originals. By due attention to this, fiction is made to 
minister to history, and may, in point of fact, contain 
as much real truth, — truth of character, though not of 
situation. "The difference between the historian and 
me," says Fielding, "is that with him every thing is 
false but the names and dates, while with me nothing 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 265 

is false but these." There is, at least, as much truth 
in this as in most witticisms. 

It is the great glory of Scott that, by nice attention 
to costume and character in his novels, he has raised 
them to historic importance without impairing their 
interest as works of art. Who now would imagine that 
he could form a satisfactory notion of the golden days 
of Queen Bess that had not read " Kenilworth" ? or 
of Richard Cceur-de-Lion and his brave paladins that 
had not read "Ivanhoe"? Why, then, it has been 
said, not at once incorporate into regular history all 
these traits which give such historical value to the 
novel ? Because in this way the strict truth which 
history requires would be violated. This cannot be. 
The fact is, History and Romance are too near akin 
ever to be lawfully united. By mingling them to- 
gether, a confusion is produced, like the mingling of 
day and night, mystifying and distorting every feature 
of the landscape. It is enough for the novelist if he 
be true to the spirit; the historian must be true also to 
the letter. He cannot coin pertinent remarks and 
anecdotes to illustrate the characters of his drama. 
He cannot even provide them with suitable costumes. 
He must take just what Father Time has given him, 
just what he finds in the records of the age, setting 
down neither more nor less. Now, the dull chroniclers 
of the old time rarely thought of putting down the 
smart sayings of the great people they biographize, 
still less of entering into minute circumstances of 
personal interest. These were too familiar to contem- 
poraries to require it, and therefore they waste their 
breath on more solemn matters of state, all important 
m 23 



266 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

in their generation, but not worth a rush in the pres- 
ent. What would the historian not give could he 
borrow those fine touches of nature with which the 
novelist illustrates the characters of his actors, — natu- 
ral touches, indeed, but, in truth, just as artificial as 
any other part, — all coined in the imagination of the 
writer ! There is the same difference between his occu- 
pation and that of the novelist that there is between 
the historical and the portrait painter. The former 
necessarily takes some great subject, with great person- 
ages, all strutting about in gorgeous state attire and air 
of solemn tragedy, while his brother artist insinuates 
himself into the family groups, and picks out natural, 
familiar scenes and faces, laughing or weeping, but in 
the charming undress of nature. What wonder that 
novel-reading should be so much more amusing than 
history? 

But we have already trespassed too freely on the 
patience of our readers, who will think the rambling 
spirit of our author contagious. Before dismissing 
him, however, we will give a taste of his quality by 
one or two extracts, not very germane to English 
literature, but about as much so as a great part of the 
work. The first is a poetical sally on Bonaparte's 
burial-place, quite in Monsieur Chateaubriand's pecu- 
liar vein : 

'-'The solitude of Napoleon, in his exile and his 
tomb, has thrown another kind of spell over a brilliant 
memory. Alexander did not die in sight of Greece ; 
he disappeared amid the pomp of distant Babylon. 
Bonaparte did not close his eyes in the presence of 
France ; he passed away in the gorgeous horizon of the 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 267 

torrid zone. The man who had shown himself in such 
powerful reality vanished like a dream ; his life, which 
belonged to history, co-operated in the poetry of his 
death. He now sleeps forever, like a hermit or a 
paria, beneath a willow, in a narrow valley, surrounded 
by steep rocks, at the extremity of a lonely path. The 
depth of the silence which presses upon him can only 
be compared to the vastness of that tumult which had 
surrounded him. Nations are absent ; their throng has 
retired. The bird of the tropics, harnessed to the car 
of the sun, as Buffon magnificently expresses it, speed- 
ing his flight downward from the planet of light, rests 
alone, for a moment, over the ashes the weight of which 
has shaken the equilibrium of the globe. 

"Bonaparte crossed the ocean to repair to his final 
exile, regardless of that beautiful sky which delighted 
Columbus, Vasco de Gama, and Camoens. Stretched 
upon the ship's stern, he perceived not that unknown 
constellations were sparkling over his head. His power- 
ful glance, for the first time, encountered their rays. 
What to him were stars which he had never seen from 
his bivouacs and which had never shone over his 
empire? Nevertheless, not one of them has failed to 
fulfil its destiny : one half of the firmament spread its 
light over his cradle, the other half was reserved to 
illuminate his tomb." — Vol. ii. pp. 185, 186. 

The next extract relates to the British statesman, 
William Pitt : 

" Pitt, tall and slender, had an air at once melancholy 
and sarcastic. His delivery was cold, his intonation 
monotonous, his action scarcely perceptible. At the 
same time, the lucidness and the fluency of his thoughts, 



268 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

the logic of his arguments, suddenly irradiated with 
flashes of eloquence, rendered his talents something 
above the ordinary line. 

"I frequently saw Pitt walking across St. James's 
Park from his own house to the palace. On his part, 
George the Third arrived from Windsor, after drinking 
beer out of a pewter pot with the farmers of the neigh- 
borhood ; he drove through the mean courts of his 
mean habitation in a gray chariot, followed by a few 
of the horse-guards. This was the master of the kings 
of Europe, as five or six merchants of the city are the 
masters of India. Pitt, dressed in black, with a steel- 
hilted sword by his side, and his hat under his arm, 
ascended, taking two or three steps at a time. In his 
passage he only met with three or four emigrants, who 
had nothing to do. Casting on us a disdainful look, 
he turned up his nose and his pale face, and passed on. 

" At home, this great financier kept no sort of order; 
he had no regular hours for his meals or for sleep. Over 
head and ears in debt, he paid nobody, and never could 
take the trouble to cast up a bill. A valet de chambre 
managed his house. Ill dressed, without pleasure, with- 
out passion, greedy of power, he despised honors, and 
would not be any thing more than William Pitt. 

"In the month of June, 1822, Lord Liverpool took 
me to dine at his country-house. As we crossed 
Putney Heath, he showed me the small house where 
the son of Lord Chatham, the statesman who had had 
Europe in his pay and distributed with his own hand 
all the treasures of the world, died in poverty." — Vol. 
ii. pp. 277, 278. 

The following extracts show the changes that have 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



269 



taken place in English manners and society, and may 
afford the "whiskered pandour" of our own day an 
opportunity of contrasting his style of dandyism with 
that of the preceding generation : 

"Separated from the Continent by a long war, the 
English retained their manners and their national char- 
acter till the end of the last century. All was not 
yet machine in the working classes, folly in the upper 
classes. On the same pavements where you now meet 
squalid figures and men in frock-coats, you were passed 
by young girls with white tippets, straw hats tied under 
the chin with a riband, with a basket on the arm, in 
which was fruit or a book: all kept their eyes cast 
down ; all blushed when one looked at them. Frock- 
coats, without any other, were so unusual in London in 
1793 that a woman, deploring with tears the death of 
Louis the Sixteenth, said to me, ' But, my dear sir, is 
it true that the poor king was dressed in a frock-coat 
when they cut off his head ?' 

"The gentlemen -farmers had not yet sold their 
patrimony to take up their residence in London ; 
they still formed, in the House of Commons, that 
independent fraction which, transferring their support 
from the opposition to the ministerial side, upheld the 
ideas of order and propriety. They hunted the fox 
and shot pheasants in autumn, ate fat goose at Michael- 
mas, greeted the sirloin with shouts of ' Roast beef 
forever!' complained of the present, extolled the past, 
cursed Pitt and the war, which doubled the price of 
port wine, and went to bed drunk, to begin the same life 
again on the following day. They felt quite sure that 
the glory of Great Britain would not perish so long as 

23* 



270 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



' God save the King' was sung, the rotten boroughs 
maintained, the game-laws enforced, and hares and 
partridges could be sold by stealth at market, under 
the names of lions and ostriches." — Vol. ii. pp. 279, 
280. 

" In 1822, at the time of my embassy to London, the 
fashionable was expected to exhibit, at the first glance, 
an unhappy and unhealthy man ; to have an air of 
negligence about his person, long nails, a beard neither 
entire nor shaven, but as if grown for a moment un- 
awares, and forgotten during the preoccupations of 
wretchedness ; hair in disorder ; a sublime, mild, 
wicked eye ; lips compressed in disdain of human 
nature; a Byronian heart, overwhelmed with weariness 
and disgust of life. 

" The dandy of the present day must have a conquer- 
ing, frivolous, Insolent look. He must pay particular 
attention to his toilet, wear mustaches, or a beard 
trimmed into a circle like Queen Elizabeth's ruff, or 
like the radiant disc of the sun. He shows the proud 
independence of his character by keeping his hat upon 
his head, by lolling upon sofas, by thrusting his boots 
into the faces of the ladies seated in admiration upon 
chairs before him. He rides with a cane, which he 
carries like a taper, regardless of the horse, which he 
bestrides, as it were, by accident. His health must be 
perfect, and he must always have five or six felicities 
upon his hands. Some radical' dandies, who have 
advanced the farthest towards the future, have a pipe. 
But, no doubt, all this has changed, even during the 
time that I have taken to describe it." — Vol. ii. pp. 
3°3> 3°4- 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 271 

The avowed purpose of the present work, singular as 
it may seem from the above extracts, is to serve as an 
introduction to a meditated translation of Milton into 
French, since wholly, or in part, completed by M. 
Chateaubriand, who thinks, truly enough, that Milton's 
"poetical ideas make him a man of our own epoch." 
When an exile in England, in his early life, during the 
troubles of the Revolution, our author earned an hon- 
orable subsistence by translating some of Milton's 
verses ; and he now proposes to render the bard and 
himself the same kind office by his labors on a more 
extended scale. Thus he concludes: "I again seat 
myself at the table of my poet. He will have nour- 
ished me in my youth and my old age. It is nobler 
and safer to have recourse to glory than to power." 
Our author's situation is an indifferent commentary on 
the value of literary fame, at least on its pecuniary 
value. No man has had more of it in his day. No 
man has been more alert to make the most of it by 
frequent, reiterated appearance before the public, — 
whether in full dress or dishabille, yet always before 
them; and now, in the decline of life, we find him 
obtaining a scanty support by " French translation and 
Italian song." We heartily hope that the bard of 
" Paradise Lost" will do better for his translator than 
he did for himself, and that M. de Chateaubriand will 
put more than five pounds in his pocket by his literary 
labor. 



BANCROFT'S UNITED STATES.* 

(January, 184 1.) 
The celebrated line of Bishop Berkeley, 

" Westward the course of empire takes its way," 

is too gratifying to national vanity not to be often 
quoted (though not always quoted right) ; and if we 
look on it in the nature of a prediction, the comple- 
tion of it not being limited to any particular time, it 
will not be easy to disprove it. Had the bishop sub- 
stituted "freedom" for "empire," it would be already 
fully justified by experience. It is curious to observe 
how steadily the progress of freedom, civil and re- 
ligious, — of the enjoyment of those rights which may 
be called the natural rights of humanity, — has gone on 
from east to west, and how precisely the more or less 
liberal character of the social institutions of a country 
may be determined by its geographical position, as 
falling within the limits of one of the three quarters 
of the globe occupied wholly or in part by members 
of the great Caucasian family. 

Thus, in Asia we find only far-extended despotisms, 
in which but two relations are recognized, those of 

* " History of the United States from the Discovery of the Amer- 
ican Continent. By George Bancroft." Vol. iii. Boston: Charles 
C. Little and James Brown. 8vo, pp. 468. 
(272) 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



273 



master and slave : a solitary master, and a nation of 
slaves. No constitution exists there to limit his au- 
thority; no intermediate body to counterbalance, or, 
at least, shield the people from its exercise. The 
people have no political existence. The monarch is 
literally the state. The religion of such countries is 
of the same complexion with their government. The 
free spirit of Christianity, quickening and elevating 
the soul by the consciousness of its glorious destiny, 
made few proselytes there; but Mohammedanism, with 
its doctrines of blind fatality, found ready favor with 
those who had already surrendered their wills — their 
responsibility — to an earthly master. In such coun- 
tries, of course, there has been little progress in sci- 
ence. Ornamental arts, and even the literature of 
imagination, have been cultivated with various suc- 
cess ; but little has been done in those pursuits which 
depend on freedom of inquiry and are connected with 
the best interests of humanity. The few monuments 
of an architectural kind that strike the traveller's eye 
are the cold memorials of pomp and selfish vanity, not 
those of public spirit, directed to enlarge the resources 
and civilization of an empire. 

As we cross the boundaries into Europe, among 
the people of the same primitive stock and under the 
same parallels, we may imagine ourselves transplanted 
to another planet. Man no longer grovels in the dust 
beneath a master's frown. He walks erect, as lord of 
the creation, his eyes raised to that heaven to which 
his destinies call him. He is a free agent, — thinks, 
speaks, acts for himself; enjoys the fruits of his own 
industry ; follows the career suited to his own genius 

M* 



274 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

and taste ; explores fearlessly the secrets of time and 
nature ; lives under laws which he has assisted in 
framing; demands justice as his right when those laws 
are invaded. In his freedom of speculation and action 
he has devised various forms of government. In most 
of them the monarchical principle is recognized ; but 
the power of the monarch is limited by written or 
customary rules. The people at large enter more or 
less into the exercise of government; and a numerous 
aristocracy, interposed between them and the crown, 
secures them from the oppression of Eastern tyranny, 
while this body itself is so far an improvement in the 
social organization that the power, instead of being 
concentrated in a single person, — plaintiff, judge, and 
executioner, — is distributed among a large number of 
different individuals and interests. This is a great ad- 
vance, in itself, towards popular freedom. 

The tendency, almost universal, is to advance still 
farther. It is this war of opinion — this contest be- 
tween light and darkness, now going forward in most 
of the countries of Europe — which furnishes the point 
of view from which their history is to be studied in 
the present, and, it may be, the following centuries ; 
for revolutions in society, when founded on opinion, 
— the only stable foundation, the only foundation at 
which the friend of humanity does not shudder, — must 
be the slow work of time; and who would wish the 
good cause to be so precipitated that, in eradicating 
the old abuses which have interwoven themselves with 
every stone and pillar of the building, the noble build- 
ing itself, which has so long afforded security to its 
inmates, should be laid in ruins? What is the best, 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



275 



what the worst form of government, in the abstract, 
may be matter of debate ; but there can be no doubt 
that the best will become the worst to a people who 
blindly rush into it without the preliminary training 
for comprehending and conducting it. Such transi- 
tions must, at least, cost the sacrifice of generations ; 
and the patriotism must be singularly pure and abstract 
which, at such cost, would purchase the possible, or 
even probable, good of a remote posterity. Various 
have been the efforts in the Old World at popular 
forms of government, but, from some cause or other, 
they have failed ; and however time, a wider inter- 
course, a greater familiarity with the practical duties 
of representation, and, not least of all, our own aus- 
picious example, may prepare the European mind for 
the possession of republican freedom, it is very certain 
that, at the present moment, Europe is not the place 
for republics. 

The true soil for these is our own continent, the 
New World, the last of the three great geographical 
divisions of which we have spoken. This is the spot 
on which the beautiful theories of the European phi- 
losopher — who had risen to the full freedom of specu- 
lation, while action was controlled — have been reduced 
to practice. The atmosphere here seems as fatal to 
the arbitrary institutions of the Old World as that has 
been to the democratic forms of our own. It seems 
scarcely possible that any other organization than these 
latter should exist here. In three centuries from the 
discovery of the country, the various races by which it 
is tenanted, some of them from the least liberal of the 
European monarchies, have, with few exceptions, come 



276 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

into the adoption of institutions of a republican char- 
acter. Toleration, civil and religious, has been pro- 
claimed, and enjoyed to an extent unknown since the 
world began, throughout the wide borders of this vast 
continent. Alas for those portions which have assumed 
the exercise of these rights without fully comprehend- 
ing their import, — who have been intoxicated with the 
fumes of freedom instead of drawing nourishment from 
its living principle ! 

It was a fortunate, or, to speak more properly, a 
providential thing that the discovery of the New World 
was postponed to the precise period when it occurred. 
Had it taken place at an earlier time, — during the 
flourishing period of the feudal ages, for example, — 
the old institutions of Europe, with their hallowed 
abuses, might have been ingrafted on this new stock, 
and, instead of the fruit of the tree of life, we should 
have furnished only varieties of a kind already far ex- 
hausted and hastening to decay. But, happily, some 
important discoveries in science, and, above all, the 
glorious Reformation, gave an electric shock to the 
intellect, long benumbed under the influence of a 
tyrannical priesthood. It taught men to distrust au- 
thority, to trace effects back to their causes, to search 
for themselves, and to take no guide but the reason 
which God had given them. It taught them to claim 
the right of free inquiry as their inalienable birthright, 
and, with free inquiry, freedom of action. The six- 
teenth and seventeenth centuries were the period of 
the mighty struggle between the conflicting elements 
of religion, as the eighteenth and nineteenth have been 
that of the great contest for civil liberty. 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



277 



It was in the midst of this universal ferment, and in 
consequence of it, that these shores were first peopled 
by our Puritan ancestors. Here they found a world 
where they might verify the value of those theories 
which had been derided as visionary or denounced as 
dangerous in their own land. All around was free, — 
free as nature herself: the mighty streams rolling on 
in their majesty, as they had continued to roll from 
the creation ; the forests, which no hand had violated, 
flourishing in primeval grandeur and beauty; their 
only tenants the wild animals, or the Indians nearly 
as wild, scarcely held together by any tie of social 
polity. Nowhere was the trace of civilized man or of 
his curious contrivances. Here was no Star Chamber 
nor Court of High Commission; no racks, nor jails, 
nor gibbets ; no feudal tyrant to grind the poor man 
to the dust on which he toiled ; no Inquisition, to 
pierce into the thought, and to make thought a crime. 
The only eye that was upon them was the eye of 
Heaven. 

True, indeed, in the first heats of suffering enthu- 
siasm they did not extend that charity to others which 
they claimed for themselves. It was a blot on their 
characters, but one which they share in common with 
most reformers. The zeal requisite for great revolu- 
tions, whether in church or state, is rarely attended by 
charity for difference of opinion. Those who are will- 
ing to do and to suffer bravely for their own doctrines 
attach a value to them which makes them impatient of 
opposition from others. The martyr for conscience' 
sake cannot comprehend the necessity of leniency to 
those who denounce those truths for which he is pre- 

24 



278 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

pared to lay down his own life. If he set so little 
value on his own life, is it natural he should set more 
on that of others? The Dominican, who dragged his 
victims to the fires of the Inquisition in Spain, freely 
gave up his ease and his life to the duties of a mis- 
sionary among the heathen. The Jesuits, who suffered 
martyrdom among the American savages in the propa- 
gation of their faith, stimulated those very savages to 
their horrid massacres of the Protestant settlements of 
New England. God has not often combined charity 
with enthusiasm. When he has done so, he has pro- 
duced his noblest work, — a More, or a Fenelon. 

But, if the first settlers were intolerant in practice, 
they brought with them the living principle of free- 
dom, which would survive when their generation had 
passed away. They could not avoid it ; for their 
coming here was in itself an assertion of that prin- 
ciple. They came for conscience' sake, — to worship 
God in their own way. Freedom of political institu- 
tions they at once avowed. Every citizen took his 
part in the political scheme, and enjoyed all the con- 
sideration of an equal participation in civil privileges ; 
and liberty in political matters gradually brought with 
it a corresponding liberty in religious concerns. In 
their subsequent contest with the mother-country they 
learned a reason for their faith, and the best manner 
of defending it. Their liberties struck a deep root 
in the soil amid storms which shook but could not 
prostrate them. It is this struggle with the mother- 
country, this constant assertion of the right of self- 
government, this tendency — feeble in its beginning, 
increasing with increasing age — towards republican 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



279 



institutions, which connects the Colonial history with 
that of the Union, and forms the true point of view 
from which it is to be regarded. 

The history of this country naturally divides itself 
into three great periods: the Colonial, when the idea 
of independence was slowly and gradually ripening in 
the American mind ; the Revolutionary, when this idea 
was maintained by arms ; and that of the Union, when 
it was reduced to practice. The first two heads are 
now ready for the historian ; the last is not yet ripe for 
him. Important contributions may be made to it in the 
form of local narratives, personal biographies, political 
discussions, subsidiary documents, and memoires pour 
servir ; but we are too near the strife, too much in the 
dust and mist of the parties, to have reached a point 
sufficiently distant and elevated to embrace the whole 
field of operations in one view and paint it in its true 
colors and proportions for the eye of posterity. We 
are, besides, too new as an independent nation, our 
existence has been too short, to satisfy the skepticism 
of those who distrust the perpetuity of our political 
institutions. They do not consider the problem, so 
important to humanity, as yet solved. Such skeptics 
are found not only abroad, but at home. Not that the 
latter suppose the possibility of again returning to those 
forms of arbitrary government which belong to the Old 
World. It would not be more chimerical to suspect the 
Emperor Nicholas, or Prince Metternich, or the citizen- 
king Louis Philippe, of being republicans at heart, and 
sighing for a democracy, than to suspect the people 
of this country (above all, of New England, the most 
thorough democracy in existence) — who have inherited 



2 8o BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

republican principles and feelings from their ancestors, 
drawn them in with their mother's milk, breathed the 
atmosphere of them from their cradle, participated in 
their equal rights and glorious privileges — of foregoing 
their birthright and falsifying their nature so far as to 
acquiesce in any other than a popular form of govern- 
ment. But there are some skeptics who, when they 
reflect on the fate of similar institutions in other 
countries, — when they see our sister states of South 
America, after nobly winning their independence, split 
into insignificant fractions, — when they see the abuses 
which from time to time have crept into our own 
administration, and the violence offered, in manifold 
ways, to the Constitution, — when they see ambitious 
and able statesmen in one section of the country pro- 
claiming principles which must palsy the arm of the Fed- 
eral Government, and urging the people of their own 
quarter to efforts for securing their independence of 
every other quarter, — there are, we say, some wise and 
benevolent minds among us who, seeing all this, feel a 
natural distrust as to the stability of the federal compact, 
and consider the experiment as still in progress. 

We, indeed, are not of that number, while we respect 
and feel the weight of their scruples. We sympathize 
fully in those feelings, those hopes, it may be, which 
animate the great mass of our countrymen. Hope is 
the attribute of republics : it should be peculiarly so 
of ours. Our fortune is all in the advance. We have 
no past, as compared with the nations of the Old 
World. Our existence is but two centuries, dating 
from our embryo state ; our real existence as an inde- 
pendent people little more than half a century. We 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 2 8l 

are to look forward, then, and go forward, not with 
vainglorious boasting, but with resolution and honest 
confidence. Boasting, indecorous in all, is peculiarly 
so in those who take credit for the great things they are 
going to do, not those they have done. The glorifica- 
tion of an Englishman or a Frenchman, with a long 
line of annals in his rear, may be offensive ; that of an 
American is ridiculous. But we may feel a just confi- 
dence from the past that we shall be true to ourselves 
for the future ; that, to borrow a cant phrase of the day, 
we shall be true to our mission, — the most momentous 
ever intrusted to a nation ; that there is sufficient intel- 
ligence and moral principle in the people, if not always 
to choose the best rulers, at least to right themselves 
by the ejection of bad ones when they find they have 
been abused ; that they have intelligence enough to 
understand their only consideration, their security as a 
nation, is in union ; that separation into smaller com- 
munities is the creation of so many hostile states ; that 
a large extent of empire, instead of being an evil, from 
embracing regions of irreconcilable local interests, is a 
benefit, since it affords the means of that commercial 
reciprocity which makes the country, by its own re- 
sources, independent of every other; and that the 
representatives drawn from these "magnificent dis- 
tances" will, on the whole, be apt to legislate more 
independently and on broader principles than if occu- 
pied with the concerns of a petty state, where each 
legislator is swayed by the paltry factions of his own 
village. In all this we may honestly confide ; but our 
confidence will not pass for argument, will not be 
accepted as a solution of the problem. Time only can 

24* 



282 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

solve it ; and until the period has elapsed which shall 
have fairly tried the strength of our institutions, through 
peace and through war, through adversity and more 
trying prosperity, the time will not have come to write 
the history of the Union.* 

But, still, results have been obtained sufficiently glo- 
rious to give great consideration to the two preliminary 
narratives, namely, of the Colonies and the Revolution, 
which prepared the way for the Union. Indeed, with- 
out these results they would both, however important 
in themselves, have lost much of their dignity and in- 
terest. Of these two narratives, the former, although 
less momentous than the latter, is most difficult to treat. 

It is not that the historian is called on to pry into 
the dark recesses of antiquity, the twilight of civiliza- 

* The preceding cheering remarks on the auspicious destinies of 
our country were written more than four years ago ; and it is not now 
as many days since we have received the melancholy tidings that the 
project for the Atinexation of Texas has been sanctioned by Congress. 
The remarks in the text on " the extent of empire" had reference only 
to that legitimate extent which might grow out of the peaceful settle- 
ment and civilization of a territory, sufficiently ample certainly, that 
already belongs to us. The craving for foreign acquisitions has ever 
been a most fatal symptom in the history of republics ; but when these 
acquisitions are made, as in the present instance, in contempt of con- 
stitutional law and in disregard of the great principles of international 
justice, the evil assumes a tenfold magnitude; for it flows not so 
much from the single act as from the principle on which it rests, and 
which may open the way to the indefinite perpetration of such acts. 
In glancing my eye over the text at this gloomy moment, and con- 
sidering its general import, I was unwilling to let it go into the world 
with my name to it, without entering my protest, in common with so 
many better and wiser in our country, against a measure which every 
friend of freedom, both at home and abroad, may justly lament as 
the most serious shock yet given to the stability of our glorious insti- 
tutions. 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



283 



tion, mystifying and magnifying every object to the 
senses, nor to unravel some poetical mythology, hang- 
ing its metaphorical allusions around every thing in 
nature, mingling fact with fiction, the material with 
the spiritual, until the honest inquirer after truth may 
fold his arms in despair before he can cry euprj/.a ; nor 
is he compelled to unroll musty, worm-eaten parch- 
ments, and dusty tomes in venerable black letter, of the 
good times of honest Caxton and Winken de Worde, 
nor to go about gleaning traditionary tales and ballads 
in some obsolete provincial patois. The record is plain 
and legible, and he need never go behind it. The 
antiquity of his story goes but little more than two 
centuries back, — a very modern antiquity. The com- 
mencement of it was not in the dark ages, but in a 
period of illumination, — an age yet glowing with the 
imagination of Shakspeare and Spenser, the philosophy 
of Bacon, the learning of Coke and of Hooker. The 
early passages of his story- — coeval with Hampden and 
Milton and Sidney — belong to the times in which the 
same struggle for the rights of conscience was going 
on in the land of our fathers as in our own. There 
was no danger that the light of the Pilgrim should be 
hid under a bushel, or that there should be any dearth 
of chronicler or bard — such as they were — to record 
his sacrifice. And fortunate for us that it was so, since 
in this way every part of this great enterprise, from its 
conception to its consummation, is brought into the 
light of day. We are put in possession not merely of 
the action, but of the motives which led to it, and, as 
to the character of the actors, are enabled to do justice 
to those who, if we pronounce from their actions only, 



284 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

would seem not always careful to do justice to them- 
selves. 

The embarrassment of the Colonial history arises 
from the difficulty of obtaining a central point of in- 
terest among so many petty states, each independent 
of the others, and all at the same time so dependent 
on a foreign one as to impair the historic dignity which 
attaches to great, powerful, and self-regulated com- 
munities. This embarrassment must be overcome by 
the author's detecting, and skilfully keeping before the 
reader, some great principle of action, if such exist, 
that may give unity and, at the same time, impor- 
tance to the theme. Such a principle did exist in that 
tendency to independence, which, however feeble till 
fanned by the breath of persecution into a blaze, was 
nevertheless the vivifying principle, as before remarked, 
of our ante-revolutionary annals. 

Whoever has dipped much into historical reading is 
aware how few have succeeded in weaving an harmo- 
nious tissue from the motley and tangled skein of gen- 
eral history. The most fortunate illustration of this 
within our recollection is Sismondi's "Republiques Ita- 
liennes," a work in sixteen volumes, in which the author 
has brought on the stage all the various governments of 
Italy for a thousand years, and in almost every variety 
of combination. Yet there is a pervading principle 
in this great mass of apparently discordant interests. 
That principle was the rise and decline of liberty. It 
is the key-note to every revolution that occurs. It 
gives an harmonious tone to the many-colored canvas, 
which would else have offended by its glaring con- 
trasts and the startling violence of its transitions. The 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



285 



reader is interested in spite of the transitions, but 
knows not the cause. This is the skill of the great 
artist. So true is this, that the same author has been 
able to concentrate what may be called the essence of 
his bulky history into a single volume, in which he 
confines himself to the development of the animating 
principle of his narrative, stripped of all the super- 
fluous accessories, under the significant title of "Rise, 
Progress, and Decline of Italian Freedom." 

This embarrassment has not been easy to overcome 
by the writers of our Colonial annals. The first vol- 
ume of Marshall's "Life of Washington" has great 
merit as a wise and comprehensive survey of this early 
period, but the plan is too limited to afford room for 
any thing like a satisfactory fulness of detail. The 
most thorough work, and incomparably the best, on the 
subject, previous to the appearance of Mr. Bancroft's, 
is the well-known history by Mr. Grahame, a truly valu- 
able book, in which the author, though a foreigner, has 
shown himself capable of appreciating the motives and 
comprehending the institutions of our Puritan ancestors. 
He has spared no pains in the investigation of such 
original sources as were at his command, and has con- 
ducted his inquiries with much candor, manifesting 
throughout the spirit of a scholar and a gentleman. 
It is not very creditable to his countrymen that they 
should have received his labors with the apathy which 
he tells us they have, amid the ocean of contemptible 
trash with which their press is daily deluged. But, in 
truth, the Colonial and Revolutionary story of this 
country is a theme too ungrateful to British ears for 
us to be astonished at any insensibility on this score. 



286 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

Mr. Grahame's work, however, with all its merit, is 
the work of a foreigner, and that word comprehends 
much that cannot be overcome by the best writer. 
He may produce a beautiful composition, faultless in 
style, accurate in the delineation of prominent events, 
full of sound logic and most wise conclusions, but he 
cannot enter into the sympathies, comprehend all the 
minute feelings, prejudices, and peculiar ways of think- 
ing, which form the idiosyncrasy of the nation. What 
can he know of these who has never been warmed by 
the same sun, lingered among the same scenes, listened 
to the same tales in childhood, been pledged to the 
same interests in manhood by which these fancies are 
nourished, — the loves, the hates, the hopes, the fears, 
that go to form national character? Write as he will, 
he is still an alien, speaking a tongue in which the 
nation will detect the foreign accent. He may produce 
a book without a blemish in the eyes of foreigners ; it 
may even contain much for the instruction of the 
native that he would not be likely to find in his own 
literature; but it will afford evidence on every page of 
its exotic origin. Botta's "History of the War of the 
Revolution" is the best treatise yet compiled of that 
event. It is, as every one knows, a most classical and 
able work, doing justice to most of the great heroes 
and actions of the period ; but, we will venture to say, 
no well-informed American ever turned over its leaves 
without feeling that the writer was not nourished 
among the men and the scenes he is painting. With 
all its great merits, it cannot be, at least for Americans, 
the history of the Revolution. 

It is the same as in portrait-painting. The artist 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 287 

may catch the prominent lineaments, the complexion, 
the general air, the peculiar costume of his subject, — 
all that a stranger's eye will demand; but he must not 
hope, unless he has had much previous intimacy with 
the sitter, to transfer those fleeting shades of expres- 
sion, the almost imperceptible play of features, which 
are revealed to the eye of his own family. 

Who would think of looking to a Frenchman for a 
history of England ? to an Englishman for the best 
history of France? Ill fares it with the nation that 
cannot find writers of genius to tell its own story. 
What foreign hand could have painted like Herodotus 
and Thucydides the achievements of the Greeks? who 
like Livy and Tacitus have portrayed the shifting char- 
acter of the Roman in his rise, meridian, and decline? 
Had the Greeks trusted their story to these same Ro- 
mans, what would have been their fate with posterity? 
Let the Carthaginians tell. All that remains of this 
nation, the proud rival of Rome, who once divided 
with her the empire of the Mediterranean and sur- 
passed her in commerce and civilization, — nearly all 
that now remains to indicate her character is a poor 
proverb, Punic a fides, a brand of infamy given by the 
Roman historian, and one which the Romans merited 
probably as richly as the Carthaginians. Yet America, 
it is too true, must go to Italy for the best history of 
the Revolution, and to Scotland for the best history of 
the Colonies. Happily, the work before us bids fair, 
when completed, to supply this deficiency; and it is 
quite time we should turn to it. 

Mr. Bancroft's first two volumes have been too long 
before the public to require any thing to be now said 



288 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

of them. Indeed, the first has already been the sub- 
ject of a particular notice in this Journal. These vol- 
umes are mainly occupied with the settlement of the 
country by the different colonies, and the institutions 
gradually established among them, with a more par- 
ticular illustration of the remarkable features in their 
character or policy. 

In the present volume the immediate point of view 
is somewhat changed. It was no longer necessary to 
treat each of the colonies separately, and a manifest 
advantage in respect to unity is gained by their being 
brought more under one aspect. A more prominent 
feature is gradually developed by the relations with the 
mother-country. This is the mercantile system, as it 
is called by economical writers, which distinguishes 
the colonial policy of modern Europe from that of 
ancient. The great object of this system was to get as 
much profit from the colonies, with as little cost to the 
mother-country, as possible. The former, instead of 
being regarded as an integral part of the empire, were 
held as property, to be dealt with for the benefit of the 
proprietors. This was the great object of legislation, 
almost the sole one. The system, so different from 
any thing known in antiquity, was introduced by the 
Spaniards and Portuguese, and by them carried to an 
extent which no other nation has cared to follow. By 
the most cruel and absurd system of prohibitory legis- 
lation, their colonies were cut off from intercourse with 
all but the parent country; and, as the latter was un- 
able to supply their demands for even the necessaries 
of life, an extensive contraband trade was introduced, 
which, without satisfying the wants of the colonies, 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 289 

corrupted their morals. It is an old story, and the 
present generation has witnessed the results, in the ruin 
of those fine countries and the final assertion of their 
independence, which the degraded condition in which 
they have so long been held has wholly unfitted them 
to enjoy. 

The English government was too wise and liberal 
to press thus heavily on its transatlantic subjects ; but 
the policy was similar, consisting, as is well known, 
and is ably delineated in these volumes, of a long series 
of restrictive measures, tending to cramp their free 
trade, manufactures, and agriculture, and to secure the 
commercial monopoly of Great Britain. This is the 
point from which events in the present volume are to 
be more immediately contemplated, all subordinate, 
like those in the preceding, to that leading principle 
of a republican tendency, — -the centre of attraction, 
controlling the movements of the numerous satellites 
in our colonial system. 

The introductory chapter in the volume opens with 
a view of the English Revolution in 1688, which, 
though not popular, is rightly characterized as leading 
the way to popular liberty. Its great object was the 
security of property; and our author has traced its 
operation, in connection with the gradual progress of 
commercial wealth, to give greater authority to the 
mercantile system. We select the following original 
sketch of the character of William the Third : 

"The character of the new monarch of Great Britain 

could mould its policy, but not its Constitution. True 

to his purposes, he yet wins no sympathy. In political 

sagacity, in force of will, far superior to the English 

n -5 



290 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



statesmen who environed him, more tolerant than his 
ministers or his Parliaments, the childless man seems 
like the unknown character in algebra, which is intro- 
duced to form the equation and dismissed when the 
problem is solved. In his person thin and feeble, with 
eyes of a hectic lustre, of a temperament inclining to 
the melancholic, in conduct cautious, of a self-relying 
humor, with abiding impressions respecting men, he 
sought no favor, and relied for success on his own 
inflexibility and the greatness and maturity of his 
designs. Too wise to be cajoled, too firm to be 
complaisant, no address could sway his resolve. In 
Holland he had not scrupled to derive an increased 
power from the crimes of rioters and assassins; in 
England, no filial respect diminished the energy of 
his ambition. His exterior was chilling ; yet he had a 
passionate delight in horses and the chase. In con- 
versation he was abrupt, speaking little and slowly, and 
with repulsive dryness ; in the day of battle he was all 
activity, and the highest energy of life, without kin- 
dling his passions, animated his frame. His trust in 
Providence was so connected with faith in general laws 
that in every action he sought the principle which 
should range it on an absolute decree. Thus, uncon- 
scious to himself, he had sympathy with the people, 
who always have faith in Providence. ' Do you dread 
death in my company?' he cried to the anxious sailors, 
when the ice on the coast of Holland had almost 
crushed the boat that was bearing him to the shore. 
Courage and pride pervaded the reserve of the prince 
who, spurning an alliance with a bastard daughter of 
Louis XIV., had made himself the centre of a gigantic 



CRITIC A L MIS CELL A NILS. 



291 



opposition to France. For England, for the English 
people, for English liberties, he had no affection, 
indifferently employing the Whigs, who found their 
pride in the Revolution, and the Tories, who had 
opposed his elevation, and who yet were the fittest 
instruments 'to carry the prerogative high.' One 
great passion had absorbed his breast, — the independ- 
ence of his native country. The harsh encroachments 
of Louis XIV., which in 1672 had made William of 
Orange a Revolutionary stadtholder, now assisted to 
constitute him a Revolutionary king, transforming the 
impassive champion of Dutch independence into the 
defender of the liberties of Europe." — Vol. iii. pp. 
2-4. 

The chapter proceeds to examine the relations, not 
always of the most friendly aspect, between England 
and the colonies, in which Mr. Bancroft pays a well- 
merited tribute to the enlightened policy of Penn and 
the tranquillity he secured to his settlement. At the 
close of the chapter is an account of that lamentable — 
farce, we should have called it, had it not so tragic a 
conclusion — the Salem witchcraft. 

Our author has presented some very striking sketches 
of these deplorable scenes, in which poor human nature 
appears in as humiliating a plight as would be possible 
in a civilized country. The Inquisition, fierce as it 
was, and most unrelenting in its persecutions, had 
something in it respectable in comparison with this 
wretched and imbecile self-delusion. The historian 
does not shrink from distributing his censure in full 
measure to those to whom he thinks it belongs. The 
erudite divine, Cotton Mather, in particular, would 



292 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



feel little pleasure in the contemplation of the portrait 
sketched for him on this occasion. Vanity, according 
to Mr. Bancroft, was quite as active an incentive to his 
movements as religious zeal ; and, if he began with the 
latter, there seems no reason to doubt that pride of 
opinion, an unwillingness to expose his error, so hu- 
miliating to the world, perhaps even to his own heart, 
were powerful stimulants to his continuing the course 
he had begun, though others faltered in it. 

Mr. Bancroft has taken some pains to show that the 
prosecutions were conducted before magistrates not 
appointed by the people, but the crown, and that a 
stop was not put to them till after the meeting of the 
representatives of the people. This, in our view, is a 
distinction somewhat fanciful. The judges held their 
commissions from the governor; and if he was ap- 
pointed by the crown it was, as our author admits, at 
the suggestion of Increase Mather, a minister of the 
people. The accusers, the witnesses, the jurors, were 
all taken from the people. And when a stop was put 
to farther proceedings by the seasonable delay inter- 
posed by the General Court, before the assembling of 
the "legal colonial" tribunal (thus giving time for the 
illusion to subside), it was, in part, from the apprehen- 
sion that, in the rising tide of accusation, no man, 
however elevated might be his character or condition, 
would be safe. 

In the following chapter, after a full exposition of 
the prominent features in the system of commercial 
monopoly which controlled the affairs of the colonies, 
we are introduced to the great discoveries in the north- 
ern and western regions of the continent, made by the 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 293 

Jesuit missionaries of France. Nothing is more ex- 
traordinary in the history of this remarkable order than 
their bold enterprise in spreading their faith over this 
boundless wilderness, in defiance of the most appalling 
obstacles which man and nature could present. Faith 
and zeal triumphed over all, and, combined with science 
and the spirit of adventure, laid open unknown regions 
in the heart of this vast continent, then roamed over 
by the buffalo and the savage, and now alive with the 
busy hum of an industrious and civilized population. 

The historian has diligently traced the progress of the 
missionaries in their journeys into the western territory 
of Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, down the deep basin 
of the Mississippi to its mouth. He has identified the 
scenes of some striking events in the history of discov- 
ery, as, among others, the place where Marquette first 
met the Illinois tribe, at Iowa. No preceding writer 
has brought into view the results of these labors in a 
compass which may be embraced, as it were, in a single 
glance. The character of this order, and their fortune, 
form one of the most remarkable objects for contem- 
plation in the history of man. Springing up, as it 
were, to prop the crumbling edifice of Catholicism 
when it" was reeling under the first shock of the 
Reformation, it took up its residence indifferently 
within the precincts of palaces or in the boundless 
plains and forests of the wilderness, held the con- 
sciences of civilized monarchs in its keeping, and 
directed their counsels, while at the same time it was 
gathering barbarian nations under its banners and 
pouring the light of civilization into the farthest and 
darkest quarters of the globe. 

25* 



294 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



"The establishment of *' the Society of Jesus,'" 
says Mr. Bancroft, "by Loyola had been contemporary 
with the Reformation, of which it was designed to 
arrest the progress, and its complete organization 
belongs to the period when the first full edition of 
Calvin's ' Institutes' saw the light. Its members were, 
by its rules, never to become prelates, and could gain 
power and distinction only by influence over mind. 
Their vows were poverty, chastity, absolute obedience, 
and a constant readiness to go on missions against 
heresy or heathenism. Their cloisters became the best 
schools in the world. Emancipated, in a great degree, 
from the forms of piety, separated from domestic ties, 
constituting a community essentially intellectual as well 
as essentially plebeian, bound together by the most per- 
fect organization, and having for their end a control 
over opinion among the scholars and courts of Europe 
and throughout the habitable globe, the order of the 
Jesuits held as its ruling maxims the widest diffusion 
of its influence, and the closest internal unity. Imme- 
diately on its institution, their missionaries, kindling 
with a heroism that defied every danger and endured 
every toil, made their way to the ends of the earth ; 
they raised the emblem of man's salvation on the Mo- 
luccas, in Japan, in India, in Thibet, in Cochin China, 
and in China ; they penetrated Ethiopia, and reached 
the Abyssinians; they planted missions among the Caf- 
fres ; in California, on the banks of the Maranhon, in 
the plains of Paraguay, they invited the wildest of bar- 
barians to the civilization of Christianity." 

"Religious enthusiasm," he adds, "colonized New 
England ; and religious enthusiasm founded Montreal, 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



2 95 



made a conquest of the wilderness on the upper Lakes, 
and explored the Mississippi. Puritanism gave New 
England its worship and its schools ; the Roman 
Church created for Canada its altars, its hospitals, and 
its seminaries. The influence of Calvin can be traced 
to every New England village ; in Canada, the monu- 
ments of feudalism and the Catholic Church stand side 
by side, and the names of Montmorenci and Bourbon, 
of Levi and Conde, are mingled with memorials of St. 
Athanasius and Augustin, of St. Francis of Assisi and 
Ignatius Loyola." — Ibid., pp. 120, 121. 

We hardly know which to select from the many 
brilliant and spirited sketches in which this part of 
the story abounds. None has more interest, on the 
whole, than the discovery of the Mississippi by Mar- 
quette and his companions, and the first voyage of the 
white men down its majestic waters : 

"Behold, then, in 1673, on the tenth day of June, 
the meek, single-hearted, unpretending, illustrious Mar- 
quette, with Joliet for his associate, five Frenchmen as 
his companions, and two Algonquins as guides, lifting 
their two canoes on their backs and walking across the 
narrow portage that divides the Fox River from the 
Wisconsin. They reach the water-shed; uttering a 
special prayer to the immaculate Virgin, they leave 
the streams that, flowing onward, could have borne 
their greetings to the Castle of Quebec ; already they 
stand by the Wisconsin. 'The guides returned,' says 
the gentle Marquette, ' leaving us alone in this un- 
known land, in the hands of Providence.' France 
and Christianity stood in the Valley of the Mississippi. 
Embarking on the broad Wisconsin, the discoverers, 



296 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

as they sailed west, went solitarily down the stream, 
between alternate prairies and hill-sides, beholding 
neither man nor the wonted beasts of the forest : no 
sound broke the appalling silence but the ripple of 
their canoe and the lowing of the buffalo. In seven 
days 'they entered happily the Great River, with a joy 
that could not be expressed ;' and the two birch-bark 
canoes, raising their happy sails under new skies and 
to unknown breezes, floated gently down the calm mag- 
nificence of the ocean stream, over the broad, clear 
sand-bars, the resort of innumerable water-fowl, — 
gliding past islands that swelled from the bosom of 
the stream, with their tufts of massive thickets, and 
between the wide plains of Illinois and Iowa, all gar- 
landed as they were with majestic forests, or checkered 
by island grove and the open vastness of the prairie. 

" About sixty leagues below the mouth of the Wis- 
consin, the western bank of the Mississippi bore on its 
sands the trail of men ; a little footpath was discerned 
leading into a beautiful prairie ; and, leaving the ca- 
noes, Joliet and Marquette resolved alone to brave a 
meeting with the savages. After walking six miles, 
they beheld a village on the banks of a river, and two 
others on a slope, at a distance of a mile and a half 
from the first. The river was the Mou-in-gou-e-na, or 
Moingona, of which we have corrupted the name into 
Des Moines. Marquette and Joliet were the first white 
men who trod the soil of Iowa. Commending them- 
selves to God, they uttered a loud cry. The Indians 
hear; four old men advance slowly to meet them, bear- 
ing the peace-pipe brilliant with many-colored plumes. 
'We are Illinois,' said they; that is, when translated, 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 297 

'We are men;' and they offered the calumet. An 
aged chief received them at his cabin with upraised 
hands, exclaiming, 'How beautiful is the sun, French- 
men, when thou comest to visit us ! Our whole village 
awaits thee ; thou shalt enter in peace into all our 
dwellings.' And the pilgrims were followed by the 
devouring gaze of an astonished crowd. 

"At the great council, Marquette published to them 
the one true God, their creator. He spoke, also, of 
the great captain of the French, the Governor of 
Canada, who had chastised the Five Nations and com- 
manded peace ; and he questioned them respecting 
the Mississippi and the tribes that possessed its banks. 
For the messengers who announced the subjection of 
the Iroquois, a magnificent festival was prepared of 
hominy, and fish, and the choicest viands from the 
prairies. 

"After six days' delay, and invitations to new visits, 
the chieftain of the tribe, with hundreds of warriors, 
attended the strangers to their canoes; and, selecting 
a peace-pipe embellished with the head and neck of 
brilliant birds and all feathered over with plumage of 
various hues, they hung around Marquette the myste- 
rious arbiter of peace and war, the sacred calumet, a 
safeguard among the nations. 

"The little group proceeded onward. 'I did not 
fear death,' says Marquette; ' I should have esteemed 
it the greatest happiness to have died for the glory of 
God.' They passed the perpendicular rocks, which 
wore the appearance of monsters ; they heard at a dis- 
tance the noise of the waters of the Missouri, known 
to them by the Algonquin name of Pekitanoni ; and 



298 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

when they came to the most beautiful confluence of 
waters in the world — where the swifter Missouri rushes 
like a conqueror into the calmer Mississippi, dragging 
it, as it were, hastily to the sea — the good Marquette 
resolved in his heart, anticipating Lewis and Clarke, 
one day to ascend the mighty river to its source, to 
cross the ridge that divides the oceans, and, descending 
a westerly-flowing stream, to publish the gospel to all 
the people of this New World. 

''In a little less than forty leagues, the canoes floated 
past the Ohio, which was then, and long afterward, 
called the Wabash. Its banks were tenanted by nu- 
merous villages of the peaceful Shawnees, who quailed 
under the incursions of the Iroquois. 

"The thick canes begin to appear so close and 
strong that the buffalo could not break through them ; 
the insects become intolerable; as a shelter against the 
suns of July, the sails are folded into an awning. The 
prairies vanish; thick forests of whitewood, admirable 
for their vastness and height, crowd even to the skirts 
of the pebbly shore. It is also observed that, in the 
land of the Chickasas, the Indians have guns. 

"Near the latitude of thirty-three degrees, on the 
western bank of the Mississippi, stood the village of 
Mitchigamea, in a region that had not been visited by 
Europeans since the days of De Soto. ' Now,' thought 
Marquette, 'we must indeed ask the aid of the Virgin.' 
Armed with bows and arrows, with clubs, axes, and 
bucklers, amid continual whoops, the natives, bent on 
war, embark in vast canoes made out of the trunks of 
hollow trees ; but, at the sight of the mysterious peace- 
pipe held aloft, God touched the hearts of the old 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



299 



men, who checked the impetuosity of the young, and, 
throwing their bows and quivers into the canoes as a 
token of peace, they prepared a hospitable welcome. 

"The next day, a long wooden canoe, containing 
ten men, escorted the discoverers, for eight or ten 
leagues, to the village of Akansea, the limit of their 
voyage. They had left the region of the Algonquins, 
and, in the midst of the Sioux and Chickasas, could 
speak only by an interpreter. A half-league above 
Akansea they were met by two boats, in one of which 
stood the commander, holding in his hand the peace- 
pipe, and singing as he drew near. After offering the 
pipe, he gave bread of maize. The wealth of his tribe 
consisted in buffalo-skins ; their weapons were axes of 
steel, — a proof of commerce with Europeans. 

"Thus had our travellers descended below the en- 
trance of the Arkansas, to the genial climes that have 
almost no winter but rains, beyond the bound of the 
Huron and Algonquin languages, to the vicinity of 
the Gulf of Mexico, and to tribes of Indians that had 
obtained European arms by traffic with Spaniards or 
with Virginia. 

"So, having spoken of God and the mysteries of 
the Catholic faith, having become certain that the 
Father of Rivers went not to the ocean east of Florida, 
nor yet to the Gulf of California, Marquette and Joliet 
left Akansea and ascended the Mississippi. 

"At the thirty-eighth degree of latitude they entered 
the river Illinois, and discovered a country without its 
paragon for the fertility of its beautiful prairies, cov- 
ered with buffaloes and stags ; for the loveliness of its 
rivulets, and the prodigal abundance of wild duck and 



3°° 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



swans, and of a species of parrots and wild turkeys. 
The tribe of Illinois, that tenanted its banks, entreated 
Marquette to come and reside among them. One of 
their chiefs, with their young men, conducted the 
party, by way of Chicago, to Lake Michigan ; and 
before the end of September all were safe in Green 
Bay. 

"Joliet returned to Quebec to announce the dis- 
covery, of which the fame, through Talon, quickened 
the ambition of Colbert; the unaspiring Marquette re- 
mained to preach the gospel to the Miamis, who dwelt 
in the north of Illinois, round Chicago. Two years 
afterward, sailing from Chicago to Mackinaw, he en- 
tered a little river in Michigan. Erecting an altar, he 
said mass after the rites of the Catholic Church; then, 
begging the men who conducted his canoe to leave 
him alone for half an hour, 

' in the darkling wood, 
Amid the cool and silence, he knelt down, 
And offered to the Mightiest solemn thanks 
And supplication.' 

At the end of the half-hour they went to seek him, and 
he was no more. The good missionary, discoverer of 
a world, had fallen asleep on the margin of the stream 
that bears his name. Near its mouth the canoe-men 
dug his grave in the sand. Ever after, the forest 
rangers, if in danger on Lake Michigan, would invoke 
his name. The people of the West will build his 
monument." — Ibid., pp. 157-162. 

The list of heroic adventurers in the path of dis- 
covery is closed by La Salle, the chivalrous French- 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



301 



man of whom we have made particular record in a pre- 
vious number of this Journal,* and whose tremendous 
journey from the Illinois to the French settlements in 
Canada, a distance of fifteen hundred miles, is also 
noticed by Mr. Bancroft. His was the first European 
bark that emerged from the mouth of the Mississippi ; 
and Mr. Bancroft, as he notices the event, and the 
feelings it gave rise to in the mind of the discoverer, 
gives utterance to his own in language truly sublime: 

"As he raised the cross by the Arkansas, as he 
planted the arms of France near the Gulf of Mexico, 
he anticipated the future affluence of emigrants, and 
heard in the distance the footsteps of the advancing 
multitude that were coming to take possession of the 
valley."— Ibid., p. 168. 

This descent of the Great River our author places, 
without hesitation, in 1682, being a year earlier than 
the one assigned by us in the article referred to.f Mr. 
Bancroft is so familiar with the whole ground, and has 
studied the subject so carefully, that great weight is 
due to his opinions ; but he has not explained the pre- 
cise authority for his conclusions in this particular. 

This leads us to enlarge on what we consider a de- 
fect in our author's present plan. His notes are dis- 
carded altogether, and his references transferred from 
the bottom of the page to the side-margin. This is 
very objectionable, not merely on account of the dis- 
agreeable effect produced on the eye, but from the 
more serious inconvenience of want of room for very 
frequent and accurate reference. Titles are necessarily 

* See " North American Review," vol. xlviii. p. 69, et seq. 
t Ibid., pp. 84, 85. 

26 



3° 2 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



much abridged, sometimes at the expense of perspi- 
cuity. The first reference in this volume is "Hallam, 
iv., 374;" the second is "Archdale." Now, Hallam 
has written several works, published in various forms 
and editions. As to the second authority, we have no 
means of identifying the passage at all. This, how- 
ever, is not the habit of Mr. Bancroft where the fact 
is of any great moment, and his references throughout 
are abundant. But the practice of references in the 
side-margin, though warranted by high authority, is 
unfavorable, from want of room, for very frequent or 
very minute specification. 

The omission of notes we consider a still greater 
evil. It is true, they lead to great abuses, are often 
the vehicle of matter which should have been incorpo- 
rated in the text, more frequently of irrelevant matter 
which should not have been admitted anywhere, and 
thus exhaust the reader's patience, while they spoil the 
effect of the work by drawing the attention from the 
continuous flow of the narrative, checking the heat 
that is raised by it in the reader's mind, and not un- 
frequently jarring on his feelings by some misplaced 
witticism or smart attempt at one. For these and the 
like reasons, many competent critics have pronounced 
against the use of notes, considering that a writer who 
could not bring all he had to say into the compass of 
his text was a bungler. Gibbon, who practised the 
contrary, intimates a regret in one of his letters that 
he had been overruled so far as to allow his notes to 
be printed at the bottom of the page instead of being 
removed to the end of the volume. But from all this 
we dissent, especially in reference to a work of research 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 303 

like the present History. We are often desirous here to 
have the assertion of the author, or the sentiment quoted 
by him, if important, verified by the original extract, 
especially when this is in a foreign language. We want 
to see the grounds of his conclusions, the scaffolding 
by which he has raised his structure ; to estimate the 
true value of his authorities; to know something of 
their characters, positions in society, and the probable 
influences to which they were exposed. Where there 
is contradiction, we want to see it stated, the pros and 
the cons, and the grounds for rejecting this and ad- 
mitting that. We want to have a reason for our faith, 
otherwise we are merely led blindfold. Our guide may 
be an excellent guide ; he may have travelled over the 
path till it has become a beaten track to him ; but we 
like to use our own eyesight too, to observe somewhat 
for ourselves, and to know, if possible, why he has 
taken this particular road in preference to that which 
his predecessors have travelled. 

The objections made to notes are founded rather on 
the abuse than the proper use of them. Gibbon only 
wished to remove his own to the end of his volume ; 
though in this we think he erred, from the difficulty 
and frequent disappointment which the reader must 
have experienced in consulting them, — a disappoint- 
ment of little moment when unattended by difficulty. 
But Gibbon knew too well the worth of this part of his 
labors to him to wish to discard them altogether. He 
knew his reputation stood on them as intimately as on 
his narrative. Indeed, they supply a body of criticism, 
and well-selected, well-digested learning, which of itself 
would make the reputation of any scholar. Many ac- 



3°4 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



com pi i shed writers, however, and Mr. Bancroft among 
the number, have come to a different conclusion ; and 
he has formed his, probably, with deliberation, having 
made the experiment in both forms. 

It is true, the fulness of the extracts from original 
sources with which his text is inlaid, giving such life 
and presence to it, and the frequency of his references, 
supersede much of the necessity of notes. We should 
have been very glad of one, however, of the kind we are 
speaking of, at the close of his expedition of La Salle. 

We have no room for the discussion of the topics in 
the next chapter, relating to the hostilities for the 
acquisition of colonial territory between France and 
England, each of them pledged to the same system of 
commercial monopoly, but must pass to the author's 
account of the aborigines east of the Mississippi. In 
this division of his subject he brings into view the 
geographical positions of the numerous tribes, their 
languages, social institutions, religious faith, and prob- 
able origin. All these copious topics are brought 
within the compass of a hundred pages, arranged with 
great harmony, and exhibited with perspicuity and sin- 
gular richness of expression. It is, on the whole, the 
most elaborate and finished portion of the volume. 

His remarks on the localities of the tribes, instead of 
a barren muster-roll of names, are constantly enlivened 
by picturesque details connected with their situation. 
His strictures on their various languages are conceived 
in a philosophical spirit. The subject is one that has 
already employed the pens of the ablest philologists 
in this country, among whom it is only necessary to 
mention the names of Du Ponceau, Pickering, and 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



3°5 



Gallatin. Our author has evidently bestowed much 
labor and thought on the topic. He examines the 
peculiar structure of the languages, which, though 
radically different, bear a common resemblance in 
their compounded and synthetic organization. He 
has omitted to notice the singular exception to the 
polysynthetic formation of the Indian languages pre- 
sented by the Otomie, which has afforded a Mexican 
philologist so ingenious a parallel, in its structure, with 
the Chinese. Mr. Bancroft concludes his review of 
them by admitting the copiousness of their combina- 
tions, and by inferring that this copiousness is no 
evidence of care and cultivation, but the elementary 
form of expression of a rude and uncivilized people ; 
in proof of which he cites the example of the partially 
civilized Indian in accommodating his idiom gradually 
to the analytic structure of the European languages. 
May not this be explained by the circumstance that 
the influence under which he makes this, like his other 
changes, is itself European ? But we pass to a more 
popular theme, the religious faith of the red man, 
whose fanciful superstitions are depicted by our author 
with highly poetical coloring : 

"The red man, unaccustomed to generalization, 
obtained no conception of an absolute substance, of a 
self-existent being, but saw a divinity in every power. 
Wherever there was being, motion, or action, there to 
him was a spirit; and, in a special manner, wherever 
there appeared singular excellence among beasts, or 
birds, or in the creation, there to him was the presence 
of a divinity. When he feels his pulse throb or his heart 
beat, he knows that it is a spirit. A god resides in the 

26* 



306 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

flint, to give forth the kindling, cheering fire ; a spirit 
resides in the mountain-cliff; a spirit makes its abode 
in the cool recesses of the grottoes which nature has 
adorned; a god dwells in each 'little grass' that springs 
miraculously from the earth. ' The woods, the wilds, 
and the waters respond to savage intelligence ; the stars 
and the mountains live ; the river, and the lake, and 
the waves have a spirit.' Every hidden agency, every 
mysterious influence, is personified. A god dwells in 
the sun, and in the moon, and in the firmament ; the 
spirit of the morning reddens in the eastern sky ; a 
deity is present in the ocean and in the fire; the crag 
that overhangs the river has its genius ; there is a spirit 
to the waterfall; a household god dwells in the Indian's 
wigwam and consecrates his home ; spirits climb upon 
the forehead to weigh down the eyelids in sleep. Not 
the heavenly bodies only, the sky is filled with spirits 
that minister to man. To the savage, divinity, broken 
as it were into an infinite number of fragments, fills all 
place and all being. The idea of unity in the creation 
may exist contemporaneously, but it existed only in 
the germ, or as a vague belief derived from the har- 
mony of the universe. Yet faith in the Great Spirit, 
when once presented, was promptly seized and appro- 
priated, and so infused itself into the heart of remotest 
tribes that it came to be often considered as a portion 
of their original faith. Their shadowy aspirations and 
creeds assumed, through the reports of missionaries, a 
more complete development, and a religious system was 
elicited from the pregnant but rude materials." — Ibid., 
pp. 285, 286. 

The following pictures of the fate of the Indian 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



3°7 



infant, and the shadowy pleasures of the land of spirits, 
have also much tenderness and beauty : 

"The same motive prompted them to bury with the 
warrior his pipe and his manitou, his tomahawk, quiver, 
and bow ready bent for action, and his most splendid 
apparel ; to place by his side his bowl, his maize, and 
his venison, for the long journey to the country of his 
ancestors. Festivals in honor of the dead were also 
frequent, when a part of the food was given to the 
flames, that so it might serve to nourish the departed. 
The traveller would find in the forests a dead body 
placed on a scaffold erected upon piles, carefully 
wrapped in bark for its shroud, and attired in warmest 
furs. If a mother lost her babe, she would cover it 
with bark and envelop it anxiously in the softest 
beaver-skins ; at the burial-place she would put by its 
side its cradle, its beads, and its rattles, and, as a last 
service of maternal love, would draw milk from her 
bosom in a cup of bark, and burn it in the fire, that 
her infant might still find nourishment on its solitary 
journey to the land of shades. Yet the new-born babe 
would be buried, not, as usual, on a scaffold, but by 
the wayside, that so its spirit might secretly steal into 
the bosom of some passing matron and be born again 
under happier auspices. On burying her daughter, 
the Chippewa mother adds, not snow-shoes and beads 
and moccasins only, but (sad emblem of woman's lot 
in the wilderness) the carrying-belt and the paddle. 
1 1 know my daughter will be restored to me,' she once 
said, as she clipped a lock of hair as a memorial ; ' by 
this lock of hair I shall discover her, for I shall take it 
with me ;' alluding to the day when she too, with her 



3 o8 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

carrying-belt and paddle, and the little relic of her 
child, should pass through the grave to the dwelling- 
place of her ancestors." 

" The faith, as well as the sympathies, of the savage, 
descended also to inferior things. Of each kind of 
animal they say there exists one, the source and origin 
of all, of a vast size, the type and original of the 
whole class. From the immense invisible beaver come 
all the beavers, by whatever run of water they are 
found ; the same is true of the elk and buffalo, of the 
eagle and robin, of the meanest quadruped of the 
forest, of the smallest insect that buzzes in the air. 
There lives for each class of animals this invisible vast 
type or elder brother. Thus the savage established his 
right to be classed by philosophers in the rank of 
Realists, and his chief effort at generalization was a 
reverent exercise of the religious sentiment. Where 
these older brothers dwell they do not exactly know ; 
yet it may be that the giant manitous which are 
brothers to beasts are hid beneath the waters, and 
that those of the birds make their homes in the blue 
sky. But the Indian believes also of each individual 
animal that it possesses the mysterious, the indestruc- 
tible principle of life; there is not a breathing thing 
but has its shade, which never can perish. Regarding 
himself, in comparison with other animals, but as the 
first among co-ordinate existence, he respects the brute 
creation, and assigns to it, as to himself, a perpetuity 
of being. '- The ancients of these lands believed that 
the warrior, when released from life, renews the pas- 
sions and activity of this world ; is seated once more 
among his friends; shares again the joyous feast; walks 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



3°9 



through shadowy forests, that are alive with the spirits 
of birds ; and there, in his paradise, 

" ' By midnight moons, o'er moistening dews, 
In vestments for the chase arrayed, 
The hunter still the deer pursues, 
The hunter and the deer a shade.' 

Ibid., pp. 295, 298. 

At the close of this chapter the historian grapples 
with the much-vexed question respecting the origin of 
the aborigines, — that po?is asinorum which has called 
forth so much sense and nonsense on both sides of the 
water, and will continue to do so as long as a new relic 
or unknown hieroglyphic shall turn up to irritate the 
nerves of the antiquary. 

Mr. Bancroft passes briefly in review the several 
arguments adduced in favor of the connection with 
Eastern Asia. He lays no stress on the affinity of 
languages or of customs and religious notions, consid- 
ering these as spontaneous expressions of similar ideas 
and wants in similar conditions of society. He at- 
taches as little value to the resemblance established by 
Humboldt between the signs of the Mexican calendar 
and those of the signs of the zodiac in Thibet and Tar- 
tary; and as for the far-famed Dighton Rock, and the 
learned lucubrations thereon, he sets them down as so 
much moonshine, pronouncing the characters Algon- 
quin. The tumuli — the great tumuli of the West — he 
regards as the work of no mortal hand, except so far 
as they have been excavated for a sepulchral purpose. 
He admits, however, vestiges of a migratory movement 
on our continent from the northeast to the south- 
west, shows very satisfactorily, by estimating the dis- 



3io BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

tances of the intervening islands, the practicability 
of a passage in the most ordinary sea-boat from the 
Asiatic to the American shores in the high latitudes, 
and, by a comparison of the Indian and Mongolian 
skulls, comes to the conclusion that the two races are 
probably identical in origin. But the epoch of their 
divergence he places at so remote a period that the 
peculiar habits, institutions, and culture of the ab- 
origines must be regarded as all their own, — as in- 
digenous. This is the outline of his theory. 

By this hypothesis he extricates the question from 
the embarrassment caused by the ignorance which the 
aborigines have manifested in the use of iron and milk, 
known to the Mongol hordes, but which he, of course, 
supposes were not known at the time of the migration. 
This is carrying the exodus back to a far period. But 
the real objection seems to be that by thus rejecting all 
evidence of communication but that founded on ana- 
tomical resemblance he has unnecessarily narrowed the 
basis on which it rests. The resemblance between a 
few specimens of Mongolian and American skulls is 
a narrow basis indeed, taken as the only one, for so 
momentous a theory. 

In fact, this particular point of analogy does not strike 
us as by any means the most powerful of the arguments 
in favor of a communication with the East, when we 
consider the small number of the specimens on which it 
is founded, the great variety of formation in individuals 
of the same family, — some of the specimens approach- 
ing even nearer to the Caucasian than the Mongolian, 
— and the very uniform deviation from the latter in the 
prominence and the greater angularity of the features. 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 311 

This connection with the East derives, in our judg- 
ment, some support, feeble though it be, from affinities 
of language ; but this is a field which remains to be 
much more fully explored. The analogy is much more 
striking of certain usages and institutions, particularly 
of a religious character, and, above all, the mytho- 
logical traditions which those who have had occasion to 
look into the Aztec antiquities cannot fail to be struck 
with. This resemblance is oftentimes in matters so 
purely arbitrary that it can hardly be regarded as 
founded in the constitution of man, so very exact that 
it can scarcely be considered as accidental. We give up 
the Dighton Rock, that rock of offence to so many 
antiquaries, who may read in it the handwriting of the 
Phoenicians, Egyptians, or Scandinavians, quite as well 
as anything else. Indeed, the vax'wxis facsimiles of it, 
made for the benefit of the learned, are so different 
from one another that, like Sir Hudibras, one may find 
in it 

" A leash of languages at once." 

We are agreed with our author that it is very good 
Algonquin. But the zodiac, the Tartar zodiac, which 
M. de Humboldt has so well shown to resemble in its 
terms those of the Aztec calendar, we cannot so easily 
surrender. The striking coincidence established by his 
investigations between the astronomical signs of the 
two nations — in a similar corresponding series, more- 
over, although applied to different uses — is, in our 
opinion, one of the most powerful arguments yet ad- 
duced for the affinity of the two races. Nor is Mr. 
Bancroft wholly right in supposing that the Asiatic 



312 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



hieroglyphics referred only to the zodiac. Like the 
Mexican, they also presided over the years, days, and 
even hours. The strength of evidence, founded on 
numerous analogies, cannot be shown without going 
into details, for which there is scarce room in the 
compass of a separate article, much less in the heel of 
one. Whichever way we turn, the subject is full of 
perplexity. It is the sphinx's riddle, and the GEdipus 
must be called from the grave who is to solve it. 

In closing our remarks, we must express our satisfac- 
tion that the favorable notice we took of Mr. Bancroft's 
labors on his first appearance has been fully ratified by 
his countrymen, and that his Colonial History estab- 
lishes his title to a place among the great historical 
writers of the age. The reader will find the pages of 
the present volume filled with matter not less interest- 
ing and important than the preceding. He will meet 
with the same brilliant and daring style, the same pic- 
turesque sketches of character and incident, the same 
acute reasoning and compass of erudition. 

In the delineation of events Mr. Bancroft has been 
guided by the spirit of historic faith.. Not that it 
would be difficult to discern the color of his politics ; 
nor, indeed, would it be possible for any one strongly 
pledged to any set of principles, whether in politics or 
religion, to disguise them in the discussion of abstract 
topics, without being false to himself and giving a false 
tone to the picture ; but, while he is true to himself, 
he has an equally imperative duty to perform, — to be 
true to others, to those on whose characters and con- 
duct he sits in judgment as a historian. No pet theory 
nor party predilections can justify him in swerving one 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



3 l 3 



hair's-breadth from truth in his delineation of the 
mighty dead, whose portraits he is exhibiting to us 
on the canvas of history. 

Whenever religion is introduced, Mr. Bancroft has 
shown a commendable spirit of liberality. Catholics 
and Calvinists, Jesuits, Quakers, and Church-of- Eng- 
land men, are all judged according to their deeds, and 
not their speculative tenets ; and even in the latter 
particular he generally contrives to find something de- 
serving of admiration, some commendable doctrine or 
aspiration in most of them. And what Christian sect 
— we might add, what sect of any denomination — is 
there which has not some beauty of doctrine to ad- 
mire? Religion is the homage of man to his Creator. 
The forms in which it is expressed are infinitely va- 
rious; but they flow from the same source, are directed 
to the same end, and all claim from the historian the 
benefit of toleration. 

What Mr. Bancroft has done for the Colonial history 
is, after all, but preparation for a richer theme, the 
history of the War of Independence ; a subject which 
finds its origin in the remote past, its results in the 
infinite future; which finds a central point of unity 
in the ennobling principle of independence, that gives 
dignity and grandeur to the most petty details of the 
conflict, and which has its foreground occupied by a 
single character, to which all others converge as to a 
centre, — the character of Washington, in war, in peace, 
and in private life the most sublime on historical record. 
Happy the writer who shall exhibit this theme worthily 
to the eyes of his countrymen ! 

The subject, it is understood, is to engage the atten- 
o 27 



314 CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

tion, also, of Mr. Sparks, whose honorable labors have 
already associated his name imperishably with our 
Revolutionary period. Let it not be feared that there 
is not compass enough in the subject for two minds 
so gifted. The field is too rich to be exhausted by a 
single crop, and will yield fresh laurels to the skilful 
hand that shall toil for them. The labors of Hume did 
not supersede those of Lingard, or Turner, or Mack- 
intosh, or Hallam. The history of the English Revo- 
lution has called forth, in our own time, the admirable 
essays of Mackintosh and Guizot ; and the palm of 
excellence, after the libraries that have been written 
on the French Revolution, has just been assigned to 
the dissimilar histories of Mignet and Thiers. The 
points of view under which a thing may be contem- 
plated are as diversified as mind itself. The most 
honest inquirers after truth rarely come to precisely 
the same results, such is the influence of education, 
prejudice, principle. Truth, indeed, is single, but 
opinions are infinitely various, and it is only by com- 
paring these opinions together that we can hope to 
ascertain what is truth. 



MADAME CALDERON'S LIFE IN 
MEXICO.* 

(January, 1843.) 

In the present age of high literary activity, travellers 
make not the least importunate demands on public at- 
tention, and their lucubrations, under whatever name, — 
Rambles, Notices, Incidents, Pencillings, — are nearly 
as important a staple for the " trade" as novels and 
romances. A book of travels, formerly, was a very 
serious affair. The traveller set out on his distant jour- 
ney with many a solemn preparation, made his will, 
and bade adieu to his friends like one who might not 
again return. If he did return, the results were em- 
bodied in a respectable folio, or at least quarto, well 
garnished with cuts, and done up in a solid form, which 
argued that it was no fugitive publication, but destined 
for posterity. 

All this is changed. The voyager nowadays leaves 
home with as little ceremony and leave-taking as if it 
were for a morning's drive. He steps into the bark 
that is to carry him across thousands of miles of ocean 
with the moral certainty of returning in a fixed week, 
almost at a particular day. Parties of gentlemen and 
ladies go whizzing along in their steamships over the 

* " Life in Mexico, during a Residence of Two Years in that 

Country. By Madame C de la B ." Boston: Little & 

Brown. Two volumes, i2mo. 

(315) 



3 i6 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

track which cost so many weary days to the Argonauts 
of old, and run over the choicest scenes of classic an- 
tiquity, scattered through Europe, Asia, and Africa, in 
less time than it formerly took to go from one end of 
the British isles to the other. The Cape of Good Hope, 
so long the great stumbling block to the navigators of 
Europe, is doubled, or the Red Sea coasted, in the 
same way, by the fashionable tourist — who glides along 
the shores of Arabia, Persia, Afghanistan, Bombay, and 
Hindostan, farther than the farthest limits of Alexan- 
der's conquests — before the last leaves of the last new 
novel which he has taken by the way are fairly cut. 
The facilities of communication have, in fact, so 
abridged distances that geography, as we have hitherto 
studied it, may be said to be entirely reformed. In- 
stead of leagues, we now compute by hours, and we 
find ourselves next-door neighbors to those whom- we 
had looked upon as at the antipodes. 

The consequence of these improvements in the means 
of intercourse is, that all the world goes abroad, or, at 
least, one half is turned upon the other. Nations are 
so mixed up by this process that . they are in some 
danger of losing their idiosyncrasy; and the Egyptian 
and the Turk, though they still cling to their religion, 
are becoming European in their notions and habits 
more and more every day. 

The taste for pilgrimage, however, it must be owned, 
does not stop with the countries where it can be car- 
ried on with such increased facility. It has begotten 
a nobler spirit of adventure, something akin to what 
existed in the fifteenth century, when the world was 
new or newly discovering, and a navigator who did not 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



3 X 7 



take in sail, like the cautious seamen of Knickerbocker, 
might run down some strange continent in the dark ; 
for in these times of dandy tourists and travel-mongers 
the boldest achievements, that have hitherto defied the 
most adventurous spirits, have been performed : the 
Himmalaya Mountains have been scaled, the Niger 
ascended, the burning heart of Africa penetrated, the 
icy Arctic and Antarctic explored, and the mysterious 
monuments of the semi-civilized races of Central Amer- 
ica have been thrown open to the public gaze. It is 
certain that this is a high-pressure age, and every de- 
partment of science and letters, physical and mental, 
feels its stimulating influence. 

No nation, on the whole, has contributed so largely 
to these itinerant expeditions as the English. Uneasy, 
it would seem, at being cooped up in their little isle, 
they sally forth in all directions, swarming over the 
cultivated and luxurious countries of the neighboring 
continent, or sending out stragglers on other more 
distant and formidable missions. Whether it be that 
their soaring spirits are impatient of the narrow quar- 
ters which nature has assigned them, or that there ex- 
ists a supernumerary class of idlers, who, wearied with 
the monotony of home and the same dull round of 
dissipation, seek excitement in strange scenes and ad- 
ventures ; or whether they go abroad for the sunshine, 
of which they have heard so much but seen so little, — 
whatever be the cause, they furnish a far greater num- 
ber of tourists than all the world besides. We Amer- 
icans, indeed, may compete with them in mere loco- 
motion, for our familiarity with magnificent distances 
at home makes us still more indifferent to them abroad ; 

27* 



31 8 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

but this locomotion is generally in the way of business, 
and the result is rarely shown in a book, unless, indeed, 
it be the leger. 

Yet John Bull is, on many accounts, less fitted than 
most of his neighbors for the duties of a traveller. 
However warm and hospitable in his own home, he 
has a cold reserve in his exterior, a certain chilling 
atmosphere, which he carries along with him, that 
freezes up the sympathies of strangers, and which is 
only to be completely thawed by long and intimate 
acquaintance. But the traveller has no time for 
intimate acquaintances. He must go forward, and 
trust to his first impressions, for they will also be his 
last. Unluckily, it rarely falls out that the first im- 
pressions of honest John are very favorable. There is 
too much pride, not to say hauteur, in his composition, 
which, with the best intentions in the world, will show 
itself in a way not particularly flattering to those who 
come in contact with him. He goes through a strange 
nation, treading on all their little irritable prejudices, 
shocking their self-love and harmless vanities, — in 
short, going against the grain, and roughing up every 
thing by taking it the wrong way. Thus he draws out 
the bad humors of the people among whom he moves, 
sees them in their most unamiable and by no means 
natural aspect, — in short, looks on the wrong side of 
the tapestry. What wonder if his notions are some- 
what awry as to what he sees ? There are, it is true, 
distinguished exceptions to all this, — English travellers 
who cover the warm heart — as warm as it is generally 
true and manly — under a kind and sometimes cordial 
manner; but they are the exceptions. The English- 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



3*9 



man undoubtedly appears best on his own soil, where 
his national predilections and prejudices, or, at least, 
the intimation of them, are somewhat mitigated in 
deference to his guest. 

Another source of the disqualification of John Bull 
as a calm and philosophic traveller is the manner in 
which he has been educated at home : the soft luxuries 
by which he has been surrounded from his cradle have 
made luxuries necessaries, and, accustomed to perceive 
all the machinery of life glide along as noiselessly and 
as swiftly as the foot of Time itself, he becomes mor- 
bidly sensitive to every temporary jar or derangement 
in the working of it. In no country since the world 
was made have all the appliances for mere physical 
and, we may add, intellectual indulgence been carried 
to such perfection as in this little island nucleus of 
civilization. Nowhere can a man get such returns 
for his outlay. The whole organization of society 
is arranged so as to minister to the comforts of the 
wealthy ; and an Englishman, with the golden talis- 
man in his pocket, can bring about him genii to do 
his bidding, and transport himself over distances with 
a thought, almost as easily as if he were the possessor 
of Aladdin's magic lamp and the fairy carpet of the 
Arabian Tales. 

When he journeys over his little island, his comforts 
and luxuries cling as close to him as round his own 
fireside. He rolls over roads as smooth and well-beaten 
as those in his own park ; is swept onward by sleek and 
well-groomed horses, in a carriage as soft and elastic, 
and quite as showy, as his own equipage ; puts up at 
inns that may vie with his own castle in their comforts 



3 2 ° 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



and accommodations, and is received by crowds of 
obsequious servants, more solicitous, probably, even 
than his own to win his golden smiles. In short, 
wherever he goes, he may be said to carry with him 
his castle, park, equipage, establishment. The whole 
are in movement together. He changes place, indeed, 
but changes nothing else. For travelling as it occurs 
in other lands, — hard roads, harder beds, and hardest 
fare, — he knows no more of it than if he had been 
passing from one wing of his castle to the other. 

All this, it must be admitted, is rather an indifferent 
preparation for a tour on the Continent. Of what 
avail is it that Paris is the most elegant capital, France 
the most enlightened country on the European terra 
fir??ia, if one cannot walk in the streets without the 
risk of being run over for want of a trottoir, nor move 
on the roads without being half smothered in a lum- 
bering vehicle, dragged by ropes at the rate of five 
miles an hour? Of what account are the fine music 
and paintings, the architecture and art, of Italy, when 
one must shiver by day for want of carpets and sea-coal 
fires, and be thrown into a fever at night by the active 
vexations of a still more tormenting kind ? The galled 
equestrian might as well be expected to feel nothing 
but raptures and ravishment at the fine scenery through 
which he is riding. It is probable he will think much 
more of his own petty hurts than of the beauties of 
nature. A travelling John Bull, if his skin is not 
off, is at least so thin-skinned that it is next doer to 
being so. 

If the European neighborhood affords so many means 
of annoyance to the British traveller, they are incal- 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



321 



culably multiplied on this side of the water, and that, 
too, under circumstances which dispose him still less 
to charity in his criticisms and constructions. On the 
Continent he feels he is among strange races, born and 
bred under different religious and political institutions, 
and, above all, speaking different languages. He does 
not necessarily, therefore, measure them by his pecu- 
liar standard, but allows them one of their own. The 
dissimilarity is so great in all the main features of 
national polity and society that it is hard to institute a 
comparison. Whatever be his contempt for the want 
of progress and perfection in the science of living, he 
comes to regard them as a distinct race, amenable to 
different laws, and therefore licensed to indulge in 
different usages, to a certain extent, from his own. If 
a man travels in China, he makes up his mind to chop- 
sticks. If he should go to the moon, he would not 
be scandalized by seeing people walk with their heads 
under their arms. He has embarked on a different 
planet. It is only in things which run parallel to those 
in his own country that a comparison can be instituted, 
and charity too often fails where criticism begins. 

Unhappily, in America the Englishman finds these 
points of comparison forced on him at every step. He 
lands among a people speaking the same language, pro- 
fessing the same religion, drinking at the same foun- 
tains of literature, trained in the same occupations of 
active life. The towns are built on much the same 
model with those in his own land. The brick houses, 
the streets, the "sidewalks," the in-door arrangements, 
all, in short, are near enough on the same pattern to 
provoke a comparison. Alas for the comparison ! The 
o* 



322 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



cities sink at once into mere provincial towns, the lan- 
guage degenerates into a provincial patois, the manners, 
the fashions, down to the cut of the clothes, and the 
equipages, all are provincial. The people, the whole 
nation — as independent as any, certainly, if not, as our 
orators fondly descant, the best and most enlightened 
upon earth — dwindle into a mere British colony. The 
traveller does not seem to understand that he is tread- 
ing the soil of the New World, where every thing is 
new, where antiquity dates but from yesterday, where 
the present and the future are all, and the past nothing, 
where hope is the watchword, and "Go ahead!" the 
principle of action. He does not comprehend that 
when he sets foot on such a land he is no longer to look 
for old hereditary landmarks, old time-honored monu- 
ments and institutions, old families that have vegetated 
on the same soil since the Conquest. He must be 
content to part with the order and something of the 
decorum incident to an old community, where the 
ranks are all precisely and punctiliously defined, where 
the power is deposited by prescriptive right in certain 
privileged hands, and where the great mass have the 
careful obsequiousness of dependants, looking for the 
crumbs that fall. 

He is now among a new people, where every thing is 
in movement, all struggling to get forward, and where, 
though many go adrift in their wild spirit of adven- 
ture, and a temporary check may be sometimes felt by 
all, the great mass still advances. He is landed on a 
hemisphere where fortunes are to be made, and men 
are employed in getting, not in spending, — a differ- 
ence which explains so many of the discrepancies be 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



3 2 3 



tween the structure of our own society and habits and 
those of the Old World. To know how to spend is 
itself a science ; and the science of spending and that 
of getting are rarely held by the same hand. 

In such a state of things, the whole arrangement of 
society, notwithstanding the apparent resemblance to 
that in his own country, and its real resemblance in 
minor points, is reversed. The rich proprietor, who 
does nothing but fatten on his rents, is no longer at 
the head of the scale, as in the Old World. The man 
of enterprise takes the lead in a bustling community, 
where action and progress, or at least change, are the 
very conditions of existence. The upper classes — if 
the term can be used in a complete democracy — have 
not the luxurious finish and accommodations to be 
found in the other hemisphere. The humbler classes 
have not the poverty-stricken, cringing spirit of hope- 
less inferiority. The pillar of society, if it want the 
Corinthian capital, wants also the heavy and superflu- 
ous base. Every man not only professes to be, but is 
practically, on a footing of equality with his neighbor. 
The traveller must not expect to meet here the defer- 
ence, or even the courtesies, which grow out of distinc- 
tion of castes. This is an awkward dilemma for one 
whose nerves have never been jarred by contact with 
the profane ; who has never been tossed about in the 
rough-and-tumble of humanity. It is little to him that 
the poorest child in the community learns how to 
read and write; that the poorest man can have — what 
Henry the Fourth so good-naturedly wished for the 
humblest of his subjects — a fowl in his pot every day 
for his dinner; that no one is so low but that he may 



3 2 4 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



aspire to all the rights of his fellow-men and find an 
open theatre on which to display his own peculiar 
talents. 

As the tourist strikes into the interior, difficulties of 
all sorts multiply, incident to a raw and unformed 
country. The comparison with the high civilization 
at home becomes more and more unfavorable, as he is 
made to feel that in this land of promise it must be 
long before promise can become the performance of 
the Old World. And yet, if he would look beyond 
the surface, he would see that much here too has been 
performed, however much may be wanting. He would 
see lands over which the wild Indian roamed as a hunt- 
ing-ground, teeming with harvests for the consumption 
of millions at home and abroad ; forests, which have 
shot up, ripened, and decayed on the same spot ever 
since the creation, now swept away to make room for 
towns and villages thronged with an industrious popu- 
lation ; rivers, which rolled on in their solitudes, un- 
disturbed except by the wandering bark of the savage, 
now broken and dimpled by hundreds of steamboats, 
freighted with the rich tribute of a country rescued 
from the wilderness. He would not expect to meet 
the careful courtesies of polished society in the pio- 
neers of civilization, whose mission has been to recover 
the great continent from the bear and the buffalo. He 
would have some charity for their ignorance of the 
latest fashions of Bond Street, and their departure, 
sometimes, even from what, in the old country, is con- 
sidered as the decorum and, it may be, decencies of 
life. But not so : his heart turns back to his own land, 
and closes against the rude scenes around him; for he 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



3 2 5 



finds here none of the soft graces of cultivation, or the 
hallowed memorials of an early civilization ; no gray, 
weather-beaten cathedrals, telling of the Normans; no 
Gothic churches in their groves of venerable oaks ; 
no moss-covered cemeteries, in which the dust of his 
fathers has been gathered since the time of the Plan- 
tagenets ; no rural cottages, half smothered with roses 
and honeysuckles, intimating that even in the most 
humble abodes the taste for the beautiful has found its 
way; no trim gardens, and fields blossoming with haw- 
thorn hedges and miniature culture ; no ring fences, 
enclosing well-shaven lawns, woods so disposed as to 
form a picture of themselves, bright threads of silvery 
water, and sparkling fountains. All these are want- 
ing, and his eyes turn with disgust from the wild and 
rugged features of nature, and all her rough accom- 
paniments, — from man almost as wild ; and his heart 
sickens as he thinks of his own land and all its scenes 
of beauty. He thinks not of the poor who leave that 
land for want of bread and find in this a kindly wel- 
come and the means of independence and advancement 
which their own denies them. 

He goes on, if he be a splenetic Sinbad, dis- 
charging his sour bile on everybody that he comes in 
contact with, thus producing an amiable ripple in the 
current as he proceeds, that adds marvellously, no 
doubt, to his own quiet and personal comfort. If he 
have a true merry vein and hearty good nature, he gets 
on, laughing sometimes in his sleeve at others, and 
cracking his jokes on the unlucky pate of Brother 
Jonathan, who, if he is not very silly, — which he very 
often is, — laughs too, and joins in the jest, though it 

28 



326 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

may be somewhat at his own expense. It matters little 
whether the tourist be Whig or Tory in his own land ; 
if the latter, he returns, probably, ten times the Con- 
servative that he was when he left it. If Whig, or even 
Radical, it matters not ; his loyalty waxes warmer and 
warmer with every step of his progress among the 
republicans ; and he finds that practical democracy, 
shouldering and elbowing its neighbors as it "goes 
ahead," is no more like the democracy which he has 
been accustomed to admire in theory, than the real 
machinery, with its smell, smoke, and clatter, under 
full operation, is like the pretty toy which he sees as a 
model in the Patent Office at Washington. 

There seems to be no people better constituted for 
travellers, at least for recording their travelling experi- 
ences, than the French. There is a mixture of frivolity 
and philosophy in their composition which is admirably 
suited to the exigencies of their situation. They mingle 
readily with all classes and races, discarding for the 
time their own nationality, — at least their national 
antipathies. Their pleasant vanity fills them with the 
desire of pleasing others, which most kindly reacts by 
their being themselves pleased : 

" Pleased with himself, whom all the world can please." 

The Frenchman can even so far accommodate him- 
self to habits alien to his own, that he can tolerate 
those of the savages themselves, and enter into a sort 
of fellowship with them, without either party altogether 
discarding his national tastes and propensities. It is 
Chateaubriand, if we are not mistaken, who relates 
that, wandering in the solitudes of the American 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



3 2 7 



wilderness, his ears were most unexpectedly saluted by 
the sounds of a violin. He had little doubt that one 
of his own countrymen must be at hand ; and in a 
wretched enclosure he found one of them, sure enough, 
teaching Messieurs les sauvages to dance. It is certain 
that this spirit of accommodation to the wild habits of 
their copper-colored friends gave the French traders 
and missionaries formerly an ascendency over the 
aborigines which was never obtained by any other 
of the white men. 

The most comprehensive and truly philosophic work 
on the genius and institutions of this country, the best 
exposition of its social phenomena, its present con- 
dition, and probable future, are to be found in the 
pages of a Frenchman. It is in the French language, 
too, that by far the greatest work has been produced 
on the great Southern portion of our continent, once 
comprehended under New Spain. 

To write a book of travels seems to most people to 
require as little preliminary preparation as to write a 
letter. One has only to jump into a coach, embark on 
board a steamboat, minute down his flying experiences 
and hair-breadth escapes, the aspect of the country as 
seen from the interior of a crowded diligence or a van- 
ishing rail-car, note the charges of the landlords and 
the quality of the fare, a dinner or two at the minister's, 
the last new play or opera at the theatre, and the affair 
is done. It is very easy to do this, certainly ; very easy 
to make a bad book of travels, but by no means easy to 
make a good one. This requires as many and various 
qualifications as to make any other good book, — quali- 
fications which must vary with the character of the 



328 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

country one is to visit. Thus, for instance, it requires 
a very different preparation and stock of accomplish- 
ments to make the tour of Italy, its studios and its 
galleries of art, or of Egypt, with its immortal pyra- 
mids and mighty relics of a primeval age, the great 
cemetery of antiquity, from what it does to travel 
understanding^ in our own land, a new creation, as it 
were, without monuments, without arts, where the only 
study of the traveller — the noblest of all studies, it is 
true — is man. The inattention to this difference of 
preparation demanded by different places has led many 
a clever writer to make a very worthless book, which 
would have been remedied had he consulted his own 
qualifications instead of taking the casual direction of 
the first steamboat or mail-coach that lay in his way. 

There is no countrv more difficult to discuss in all 
its multiform aspects than Mexico, or, rather, the wild 
region once comprehended under the name of New 
Spain. Its various climates, bringing to perfection the 
vegetable products of the most distant latitudes; its 
astonishing fruitfulness in its lower regions, and its 
curse of barrenness over many a broad acre of its 
plateau ; its inexhaustible mines, that have flooded the 
Old World with an ocean of silver, such as Columbus 
in his wildest visions never dreamed of, — and, unhap- 
pily, by a hard mischance, never lived to realize him- 
self; its picturesque landscape, where the volcanic fire 
gleams amid wastes of eternal snow, and a few hours 
carry the traveller from the hot regions of the lemon 
and the cocoa to the wintry solitudes of the mountain 
fir; its motley population, made up -of Indians, old 
Spaniards, modern Mexicans, mestizos, mulattoes, and 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



3 2 9 



zambos ; its cities built in the clouds ; its lakes of salt 
water, hundreds of miles from the ocean ; its people, 
with their wild and variegated costume, in keeping, as 
we may say, with its extraordinary scenery ; its stately 
palaces, half furnished, where services of gold and 
silver plate load the tables in rooms without a carpet, 
while the red dust of the bricks soils the diamond- 
sprinkled robes of the dancer ; the costly attire of its 
higher classes, blazing with pearls and jewels ; the 
tawdry magnificence of its equipages, saddles inlaid 
with gold, bits and stirrups of massive silver, all exe- 
cuted in the clumsiest style of workmanship ; its lower 
classes, — the men with their jackets glittering with 
silver buttons, and rolls of silver tinsel round their 
caps ; the women with petticoats fringed with lace, 
and white satin shoes on feet unprotected by a stock- 
ing j its high-born fair ones crowding to the cockpit 
and solacing themselves with the fumes of a cigar ; its 
churches and convents, in which all those sombre rules 
of monastic life are maintained in their primitive rigor 
which have died away before the liberal spirit of the 
age on the other side of the water ; its swarms of 
leperos, the lazzaroni of the land ; its hordes of almost 
legalized banditti, who stalk openly in the streets and 
render the presence of an armed escort necessary to 
secure a safe drive into the environs of the capital ; its 
whole structure of society, in which a republican form 
is thrown over institutions as aristocratic and castes as 
nicely denned as in any monarchy of Europe; in short, 
its marvellous inconsistencies and contrasts in climate, 
character of the people, and face of the land, — so mar- 
vellous as, we trust, to excuse the unprecedented length 

28* 



330 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

of this sentence, — undoubtedly make modern Mexico 
one of the most prolific, original, and difficult themes 
for the study of the traveller. 

Yet this great theme has found in Humboldt a writer 
of strength sufficient to grapple with it in nearly all its 
relations. While yet a young man, or, at least, while 
his physical as well as mental energies were in their 
meridian, he came over to this country with an en- 
thusiasm for science which was only heightened by 
obstacles, and with stores of it already accumulated 
that enabled him to detect the nature of every new 
object that came under his eye and arrange it in its 
proper class. With his scientific instruments in his 
hand, he might be seen scaling the snow-covered peaks 
of the Cordilleras, or diving into their unfathomable 
caverns of silver; now wandering through their dark 
forests in search of new specimens for his herbarium, 
now coasting the stormy shores of the Gulf and pene- 
trating its unhealthy streams, jotting down every land- 
mark that might serve to guide the future navigator, or 
surveying the crested Isthmus in search of a practicable 
communication between the great seas on its borders, 
and then, again, patiently studying the monuments 
and manuscripts of the Aztecs in the capital, or min- 
gling with the wealth and fashion in its saloons; fre- 
quenting every place, in short, and everywhere at 
home : 

" Grammaticus, rhetor, geometres, .... omnia novit." 

The whole range of these various topics is brought 
under review in his pages, and on all he sheds a ray, 
sometimes a flood, of light. His rational philosophy, 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



3S l 



content rather to doubt than to decide, points out the 
track which other adventurous spirits may follow up 
with advantage. No antiquary has done so much 
towards determining the original hives of the semi- 
civilized races of the Mexican plateau. No one, not 
even of the Spaniards, has brought together such an 
important mass of information in respect to the re- 
sources, natural products, and statistics generally, of 
New Spain. His explorations have identified more 
than one locality and illustrated more than one cu- 
rious monument of the people of Anahuac, which had 
bafiied the inquiries of native antiquaries; and his 
work, while embodying the results of profound scholar- 
ship and art, is at the same time, in many respects, the 
very best manuel du voyageur, and, as such, has been 
most frequently used by subsequent tourists. It is 
true, his pages are sometimes disfigured by pedantry, 
ambitious display, learned obscurity, and other affecta- 
tions of the man of letters. But what human work is 
without its blemishes? His various writings on the 
subject of New Spain, taken collectively, are one of 
those monuments which may be selected to show the 
progress of the species. Their author reminds us of 
one of the ancient athletae, who descended into the 
arena to hurl the discus with a giant arm, that dis- 
tanced every cast of his contemporaries. 

There is one branch of his fruitful subject which M. 
de Humboldt has not exhausted, and, indeed, has but 
briefly touched on. This is the social condition of the 
country, especially as found in its picturesque capital. 
This has been discussed by subsequent travellers more 
fully, and Ward, Bullock, Lyons, Poinsett, Tudor, 



332 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

Latrobe, have all produced works which have for their 
object, more or less, the social habits and manners of 
the people. With most of them this is not the promi- 
nent object ; and others of them, probably, have found 
obstacles in effecting it, to any great extent, from an 
imperfect knowledge of the language, — the golden key 
to the sympathies of a people, — without which a travel- 
ler is as much at fault as a man without an eye for color 
in a picture-gallery, or an ear for music at a concert. 
He may see and hear, indeed, in both; but cui bono? 
The traveller, ignorant of the language of the nation 
whom he visits, may descant on the scenery, the roads, 
the architecture, the outside of things, the rates and 
distances of posting, the dress of the people in the 
streets, and may possibly meet a native or two, half 
denaturalized, kept to dine with strangers, at his 
banker's. But as to the interior mechanism of society, 
its secret sympathies, and familiar tone of thinking 
and feeling, he can know no more than he could of 
the contents of a library by running over the titles of 
strange and unknown authors packed together on the 
shelves. 

It was to supply this deficiency that the work before 
us, no doubt, was given to the public, and it was com- 
posed under circumstances that afforded every possible 
advantage and facility to its author. Although the 
initials only of the name are given in the title-page, 
yet, from these and certain less equivocal passages in 
the body of the work, it requires no GEdipus to divine 
that the author is the wife of the Chevalier Calderon 
de la Barca, well known in this country during his 
long residence as Spanish minister at Washington, 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 333 

where his amiable manners and high personal qualities 
secured him general respect and the regard of all who 
knew him. On the recognition of the independence 
of Mexico by the mother-country, Senor Calderon was 
selected to fill the office of the first Spanish envoy to 
the republic. It was a delicate mission after so long 
an estrangement, and it was hailed by the Mexicans 
with every demonstration of pride and satisfaction. 
Though twenty years had elapsed since they had estab- 
lished their independence, yet they felt as a wayward 
son may feel who, having absconded from the paternal 
roof and set up for himself, still looks back to it with 
a sort of reverence, and, in the plenitude of his pros- 
perity, still feels the want of the parental benediction. 
We, who cast off our allegiance in a similar way, can 
comprehend the feeling. The new minister, from the 
moment of his setting foot on the Mexican shore, was 
greeted with an enthusiasm which attested the popular 
feeling, and his presence in the capital was celebrated 
by theatrical exhibitions, bull-fights, illuminations, 
fetes public and private, and every possible demon- 
stration of respect for the new envoy and the country 
who sent him. His position secured him access to 
every place of interest to an intelligent stranger, and 
introduced him into the most intimate recesses of so- 
ciety, from which the stranger is commonly excluded, 
and to which, indeed, none but a Spaniard could, 
under any circumstances, have been admitted. For- 
tunately, the minister possessed, in the person of his 
accomplished wife, one who had both the leisure and 
the talent to profit by these uncommon opportunities, 
and the result is given in the work before us, consist- 



334 



CRITICAL M ISC EL LA ALES. 



ing of letters to her family, which, it seems, since her 
return to the United States, have been gathered to- 
gether and prepared for publication.* 

The present volumes make no pretensions to enlarge 
the boundaries of our knowledge in respect to the min- 
eral products of the country, its geography, its sta- 
tistics, or, in short, to physical or political science. 
These topics have been treated with more or less 
depth by the various travellers who have written since 
the great publications of Humboldt. We have had 
occasion to become tolerably well acquainted with 
their productions ; and we may safely assert that for 
spirited portraiture of society, — a society unlike any 
thing existing in the Old World or the New, — for pic- 
turesque delineation of scenery, for richness of illus- 
tration and anecdote, and for the fascinating graces of 
style, no one of them is to be compared with "Life in 
Mexico." 

* The analysis of the work, with several pages of extracts from it, 
is here omitted, as containing nothing that is not already familiar to 
the English reader. 



MOLIERE.* 

(October, 1828.) 

The French surpass every other nation, indeed all 
the other nations of Europe put together, in the amount 
and excellence of their memoirs. Whence comes this 
manifest superiority? The important Collection re- 
lating to the History of France, commencing as early 
as the thirteenth century, forms a basis of civil history 
more authentic, circumstantial, and satisfactory to an 
intelligent inquirer than is to be found among any 
other people ; and the multitude of biographies, per- 
sonal anecdotes, and similar scattered notices which 
have appeared in France during the two last centuries 
throw a flood of light on the social habits and general 
civilization of the period in which they were written. 
The Italian histories (and every considerable city in 
Italy, says Tiraboschi, had its historian as early as the 
thirteenth century) are fruitful only in wars, massacres, 
treasonable conspiracies, or diplomatic intrigues, matters 
that affect the tranquillity of the state. The rich body 
of Spanish chronicles, which maintain an unbroken 
succession from the reign of Alphonso the Wise to that 
of Philip the Second, are scarcely more personal or 
interesting in their details, unless it be in reference 
to the sovereign and his immediate court. Even the 

* " Histoire de la Vie et des Ouvrages de Moliere. Par J. Tasche- 
reau." Paris. 1825. 

(335) 



33 6 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



English, in their memoirs and autobiographies of the 
last century, are too exclusively confined to topics of 
public notoriety, as the only subject worthy of record 
or which can excite a general interest in their readers. 
Not so with the French. The most frivolous details 
assume in their eyes an importance when they can be 
made illustrative of an eminent character; and even 
when they concern one of less note, they become suffi- 
ciently interesting, as just pictures of life and manners. 
Hence, instead of exhibiting their hero only as he 
appears on the great theatre, they carry us along with 
him into retirement, or into those social circles where, 
stripped of his masquerade dress, he can indulge in all 
the natural gayety of his heart, — in those frivolities 
and follies which display the real character much better 
than all his premeditated wisdom ; those little nothings 
which make up so much of the sum of French memoirs, 
but which, however amusing, are apt to be discarded 
by their more serious English neighbors as something 
derogatory to their hero. Where shall we find a more 
lively portraiture of that interesting period when feudal 
barbarism began to fade away before the civilized in- 
stitutions of modern times, than in Philip de Comines' 
sketches of the courts of France and Burgundy in the 
latter half of the fifteenth century? where a more nice 
development of the fashionable intrigues, the corrupt 
Machiavelian politics, which animated the little cote- 
ries, male and female, of Paris, under the regency of 
Anne of Austria, than in the Memoirs of De Retz? — to 
say nothing of the vast amount of similar contributions 
in France during the last century, which, in the shape 
of letters and anecdotes, as well as memoirs, have made 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



337 



us as intimately acquainted with the internal move- 
ments of society in Paris, under all its aspects, literary, 
fashionable, and political, as if they had passed in 
review before our own eyes. 

The French have been remarked for their excellence 
in narrative ever since the times of the fabliaux and 
the old Norman romances. Somewhat of their success 
in this way may be imputed to the structure of their 
language, whose general currency, and whose peculiar 
fitness for prose composition, have been noticed from 
a very early period. Brunetto Latini, the master of 
Dante, wrote his Tcsoi'o in French, in preference to his 
own tongue, as far back as the middle of the thirteenth 
century, on the ground "that its speech was the most 
universal and most delectable of all the dialects of 
Europe." And Dante asserts in his treatise "on Vul- 
gar Eloquence" that "the superiority of the French 
consists in its adaptation, by means of its facility and 
agreeableness, to narratives in prose." Much of the 
wild, artless grace, the naivete, which characterized it 
in its infancy, has been gradually polished away by 
fastidious critics, and can scarcely be said to have sur- 
vived Marot and Montaigne. But the language has 
gained considerably in perspicuity, precision, and sim- 
plicity of construction, to which the jealous labors of 
the French Academy must be admitted to have con- 
tributed essentially. This simplicity of construction, 
refusing those complicated inversions so usual in the 
other languages of the Continent, and its total want of 
prosody, though fatal to poetical purposes, have greatly 
facilitated its acquisition to foreigners, and have made 
it a most suitable vehicle for conversation. Since the 
p 29 



$3§ BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

time of Louis the Fourteenth, accordingly, it has be- 
come the language of the courts and the popular me- 
dium of communication in most of the countries of 
Europe. Since that period, too, it has acquired a 
number of elegant phrases and familiar turns of expres- 
sion, which have admirably fitted it for light, popular 
narrative, like that which enters into memoirs, letter- 
writing, and similar kinds of composition. 

The character and situation of the writers themselves 
may account still better for the success of the French 
in this department. Many of them, as Joinville, Sully, 
Comines, De Thou, Rochefoucault, Torcy, have been 
men of rank and education, the counsellors or the 
friends of princes, acquiring from experience a shrewd 
perception of the character and of the forms of society. 
Most of them have been familiarized in those polite 
circles which, in Paris more than any other capital, 
seem to combine the love of dissipation and fashion 
with a high relish for intellectual pursuits. The state 
of society in France, or, what is the same thing, in 
Paris, is admirably suited to the purposes of the memoir- 
writer. The cheerful, gregarious temper of the inhab- 
itants, which mingles all ranks in the common pursuit 
of pleasure, the external polish, which scarcely deserts 
them in the commission of the grossest violence, the 
influence of the women, during the last two centuries, 
far superior to that of the sex among any other people, 
and exercised alike on matters of taste, politics, and 
letters, the gallantry and licentious intrigues so usual 
in the higher classes of this gay metropolis, and which 
fill even the life of a man of letters, so stagnant in 
every other country, with stirring and romantic adven- 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



339 



ture, — all these, we say, make up a rich and varied 
panorama, that can hardly fail of interest under the 
hand of the most common artist. 

Lastly, the vanity of the French may be considered as 
another cause of their success in this kind of writing, 
— a vanity which leads them to disclose a thousand 
amusing particulars which the reserve of an English- 
man, and perhaps his pride, would discard as altogether 
unsuitable to the public ear. This vanity, it must be 
confessed, however, has occasionally seduced their 
writers, under the garb of confessions and secret 
memoirs, to make such a disgusting exposure of human 
infirmity as few men would be willing to admit, even 
to themselves. 

The best memoirs of late produced in France seem 
to have assumed somewhat of a novel shape. While 
they are written with the usual freedom and vivacity, 
they are fortified by a body of references and illustra- 
tions that attest an unwonted degree of elaboration 
and research. Such are those of Rousseau, La Fon- 
taine, and Moliere, lately published. The last of these, 
which forms the subject of our article, is a compilation 
of all that has ever been recorded of the life of Moliere. 
It is executed in an agreeable manner, and has the 
merit of examining, with more accuracy than has been 
hitherto done, certain doubtful points in his biography, 
and of assembling together in a convenient form what 
has before been diffused over a great variety of surface. 
But, however familiar most of these particulars may be 
to the countrymen of Moliere (by far the greatest comic 
genius in his own nation, and, in very many respects, 
inferior to none in any other), they are not so current 



34o 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



elsewhere as to lead us to imagine that some account 
of his life and literary labors would be altogether 
unacceptable to our readers. 

Jean-Baptiste Poquelin (Moliere) was born in Paris, 
January 15, 1622. His father was an upholsterer, as 
his grandfather had been before him ; and the young 
Poquelin was destined to exercise the same hereditary 
craft, to which, indeed, he served an apprenticeship 
until the age of fourteen. In this determination his 
father was confirmed by the office which he had ob- 
tained for himself, in connection with his original 
vocation, of valet de cha??ibre to the king, with the 
promise of a reversion of it to his son on his own 
decease. The youth accordingly received only such 
a meagre elementary education as was usual with the 
artisans of that day. But a secret consciousness of his 
own powers convinced him that he was destined by 
nature for higher purposes than that of quilting sofas 
and hanging tapestry. His occasional presence at the 
theatrical representations of the Hotel de Bourgogne is 
said also to have awakened in his mind, at this period, 
a passion for the drama. He therefore solicited his 
father to assist him in obtaining more liberal instruc- 
tion ; and when the latter at length yielded to the 
repeated entreaties of his son, it was with the reluctance 
of one who imagines that he is spoiling a good mechanic 
in order to make a poor scholar. He was accordingly 
introduced into the Jesuits' College of Clermont, where 
he followed the usual course of study for five years with 
diligence and credit. He was fortunate enough to 
pursue the study of philosophy under the direction of 
the celebrated Gassendi, with his fellow-pupils, Cha- 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



341 



pelle the poet, afterwards his intimate friend, and 
Bernier, so famous subsequently for his travels in the 
East, but who, on his return, had the misfortune to 
lose the favor of Louis the Fourteenth by replying to 
him, that "of all the countries he had ever seen, he 
preferred Switzerland." 

On the completion of his studies, in 1641, he was 
required to accompany the king, then Louis the Thir- 
teenth, in his capacity of valet de chambre (his father 
being detained in Paris by his infirmities), on an ex- 
cursion to the south of France. This journey afforded 
him the opportunity of becoming intimately acquainted 
with the habits of the court, as well as those of the 
provinces, of which he afterwards so repeatedly availed 
himself in his comedies. On his return he commenced 
the study of the law, and had completed it, it would 
appear, when his old passion for the theatre revived 
with increased ardor, and, after some hesitation, he 
determined no longer to withstand the decided impulse 
of his genius. He associated himself with one of those 
city companies of players with which Paris had swarmed 
since the days of Richelieu, — a minister who aspired 
after the same empire in the republic of letters which 
he had so long maintained over the state, and whose 
ostentatious patronage eminently contributed to de- 
velop that taste for dramatic exhibition which has dis- 
tinguished his countrymen ever since. 

The consternation of the elder Poquelin on receiving 
the intelligence of his son's unexpected determination 
may be readily conceived. It blasted at once all the 
fair promise which the rapid progress the latter had 
made in his studies justified him in forming, and it 

29* 



342 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



degraded him to an unfortunate profession, esteemed 
at that time even more lightly in France than it has 
been in other countries. The humiliating dependence 
of the comedian on the popular favor, the daily ex- 
posure of his person to the caprice and insults of an 
unfeeling audience, the numerous temptations incident 
to his precarious and unsettled life, may furnish abun- 
dant objections to this profession in the mind of every 
parent. But in France, to all these objections were 
superadded others of a graver cast, founded on religion. 
The clergy there, alarmed at the rapidly-increasing taste 
for dramatic exhibitions, openly denounced these ele- 
gant recreations as an insult to the Deity ; and the 
pious father anticipated, in this preference of his son, 
his spiritual no less than his temporal perdition. He 
actually made an earnest remonstrance to him to this 
effect, through the intervention of one of his friends, 
who, however, instead of converting the youth, was 
himself persuaded to join the company then organizing 
under his direction. But his familv were never recon- 
ciled to his proceeding ; and even at a later period of 
his life, when his splendid successes in his new career 
had shown how rightly he had understood the character 
of his own genius, they never condescended to avail 
themselves of the freedom of admission to his theatre, 
which he repeatedly proffered. M. Bret, his editor, 
also informs us that he had himself seen a genealogical 
tree in the possession of the descendants of this same 
family, in which the name of Moliere was not even 
admitted ! Unless it were to trace their connection 
with so illustrious a name, what could such a family 
want of a genealogical tree ? It was from a deference 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



343 



to these scruples that our hero annexed to his patro- 
nymic the name of Moliere, by which alone he has 
been recognized by posterity. 

During the three following years he continued play- 
ing in Paris, until the turbulent regency of Anne of 
Austria withdrew the attention of the people from the 
quiet pleasures of the drama to those of civil broil and 
tumult. Moliere then quitted the capital for the south 
of France. From this period, 1646 to 1658, his his- 
tory presents few particulars worthy of record. He 
wandered with his company through the different prov- 
inces, writing a few farces which have long since per- 
ished, performing at the principal cities, and, wherever 
he went, by his superior talent withdrawing the crowd 
from every other spectacle to the exhibition of his own. 
During this period, too, he was busily storing his 
mind with those nice observations of men and man- 
ners so essential to the success of the dramatist, and 
which were to ripen there until a proper time for their 
development should arrive. At the town of Pezenas 
they still show an elbow-chair of Moliere's (as at Mont- 
pellier they show the gown of Rabelais), in which the 
poet, it is said, ensconced in a corner of a barber's 
shop, would sit for the hour together, silently watching 
the air, gestures, and grimaces of the village politi- 
cians, who in those days, before coffee-houses were in- 
troduced into France, used to congregate in this place 
of resort. The fruits of this study may be easily dis- 
cerned in those original draughts of character from the 
middling and lower classes with which his pieces every- 
where abound. 

In the south of France he met with the Prince of 



344 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

Conti, with whom he had contracted a friendship at 
the college of Clermont, and who received him with 
great hospitality. The prince pressed upon him the 
office of his private secretary; but, fortunately for 
letters, Moliere was constant in his devotion to the 
drama, assigning as his reason that "the occupation 
was of too serious a complexion to suit his taste, and 
that, though he might make a passable author, he 
should make a very poor secretary." Perhaps he was 
influenced in this refusal, also, by the fate of the pre- 
ceding incumbent, who had lately died of a fever, in 
consequence of a blow from the fire-tongs, which his 
highness, in a fit of ill humor, had given him on the 
temple. However this may be, it was owing to the 
good offices of the prince that he obtained access to 
Monsieur, the only brother of Louis the Fourteenth, 
and father of the celebrated regent, Philip of Orleans, 
who, on his return to Paris in 1658, introduced him to 
the king, before whom, in the month of October fol- 
lowing, he was allowed, with his company, to perform 
a tragedy of Corneille's and one of his own farces. 

His little corps was now permitted to establish itself 
under the title of the "Company of Monsieur," and 
the theatre of the Petit-Bourbon was assigned as the 
place for its performances. Here, in the course of a 
few weeks, he brought out his Etourdi and Le Defiit 
Amoureux, comedies in verse and in five acts, which 
he had composed during his provincial pilgrimage, and 
which, although deficient in an artful liaisofi of scenes 
and in probability of incident, exhibit, particularly 
the last, those fine touches of the ridiculous, which 
revealed the future author of the Tartuffe and the 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



345 



Misanthrope. They indeed found greater favor with 
the audience than some of his later pieces ; for in the 
former they could only compare him with the wretched 
models that had preceded him, while in the latter they 
were to compare him with himself. 

In the ensuing year Moliere exhibited his celebrated 
farce of Les Precieuses Ridicules ; a piece in only one 
act, but which, by its inimitable satire, effected such a 
revolution in the literary taste of his countrymen as 
has been accomplished by few works of a more im- 
posing form, and which may be considered as the basis 
of the dramatic glory of Moliere, and the dawn of 
good comedy in France. This epoch was the com- 
mencement of that brilliant period in French literature 
which is so well known as the "age of Louis the Four- 
teenth ; and yet it was distinguished by such a puerile, 
meretricious taste as is rarely to be met with except in 
the incipient stages of civilization or in its last decline. 
The cause of this melancholy perversion of intellect is 
mainly imputable to the influence of a certain coterie 
of wits, whose rank, talents, and successful authorship 
had authorized them in some measure to set up as the 
arbiters of taste and fashion. This choice assembly, 
consisting of the splenetic Rochefoucault, thj bel-esprit 
Voiture, Balzac, whose letters afford the earliest example 
of numbers in French prose, the lively and licentious 
Bussy-Rabutin, Chapelain, who, as a wit has observed, 
might still have had a reputation had it not been for his 
"Pucelle," the poet Benserade, Menage, and others of 
less note, together with such eminent women as Ma- 
dame Lafayette, Mademoiselle Scuderi (whose eternal 
romances, the delight of her own age, have been the 
p* 



346 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

despair of every other), and even the elegant Sevigne, 
was accustomed to hold its reunions principally at the 
Hotel de Rambouillet, the residence of the marchioness 
of that name, and which from this circumstance has ac- 
quired such ill-omened notoriety in the history of letters. 
Here thev were wont to hold the most solemn dis- 
cussions on the most frivolous topics, but especially on 
matters relating to gallantry and love, which they de- 
bated with all the subtlety and metaphysical refinement 
that centuries before had characterized the romantic 
Courts of Love in the south of France. All this was 
conducted in an affected jargon, in which the most 
common things, instead of being called by their usual 
names, were signified by ridiculous periphrases, which, 
while it required neither wit nor ingenuity to invent 
them, could have had no other merit, even in their 
own eyes, than that of being unintelligible to the vul- 
gar. To this was superadded a tone of exaggerated 
sentiment, and a ridiculous code of etiquette, by which 
the intercourse of these exclusives was to be regulated 
with each other, all borrowed from the absurd ro- 
mances of Calprenede an ' Scuderi. Even the names 
of the parties underwent a metamorphosis, and Madame 
de Rambouillet' s Christian name of Catherine, being 
found too trite and unpoetical, was converted into 
A?'thenice, by which she was ro generally recognized 
as to be designated by it in Flechier's eloquent funeral 
oration on her daughter.* These insipid affectations, 

* How comes La Harpe to fall into the error of supposing that 
Flcchier referred to Madame Montausier by this epithet of Arthenice ? 
The bishop's style in this passage is as unequivocal as usual. See 
Cours de Litterature, etc., tome vi. p. 167. 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



347 



which French critics are fond of imputing to an Italian 
influence, savor quite as much of the Spanish cultismo 
as of the concetti of the former nation, and may be yet 
more fairly referred to the same false principles of 
taste which distinguished the French Pleiades of the 
sixteenth century, and the more ancient compositions 
of their Provencal ancestors. Dictionaries were com- 
piled and treatises written illustrative of this precious 
vocabulary; all were desirous of being initiated into 
the mysteries of so elegant a science ; even such men 
as Corneilie and Bossuet did not disdain to frequent 
the saloons where it was studied ; the spirit of imita- 
tion, more active in France than in other countries, 
took possession of the provinces ; every village had its 
coterie of precieuses after the fashion of the capital, 
and a false taste and criticism threatened to infect the 
very sources of pure and healthful literature. 

It was against this fashionable corruption that Mo- 
liere aimed his wit in the little satire of the Precieuses 
Ridicules, in which the valets of two noblemen are 
represented as aping their masters' tone of conversa- 
tion for the purpose of imposing on two young ladies 
fresh from the provinces and great admirers of the new 
style. The absurdity of these affectations is still more 
strongly relieved by the contemptuous incredulity of 
the father and servant, who do not comprehend a word 
of them. By this process Moliere succeeded both in 
exposing and degrading these absurd pretensions, as 
he showed how opposite they were to common sense 
and how easily they were to be acquired by the most 
vulgar minds. The success was such as might have 
been anticipated on an appeal to popular feeling, where 



348 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

nature must always triumph over the arts of affectation. 
The piece was welcomed with enthusiastic applause, 
and the disciples of the Hotel Rambouillet, most of 
whom were present at the first exhibition, beheld the 
fine fabric which they had been so painfully construct- 
ing brought to the ground by a single blow. "And 
these follies," said Menage to Chapelain, "which you 
and I see so finely criticised here, are what we have 
been so long admiring. We must go home and burn 
our idols." "Courage, Moliere!" cried an old man 
from the pit; "this is genuine comedy." The price 
of the seats was doubled from the time of the second 
representation. Nor were the effects of the satire 
merely transitory. It converted an epithet of praise 
into one of reproach ; and a femme precieuse, a style 
p?'ecieux, xtoii precieux, once so much admired, have 
ever since been used only to signify the most ridiculous 
affectation. 

There was, in truth, however, quite as much luck as 
merit in this success of Moliere, whose production ex- 
hibits no finer raillery or better-sustained dialogue than 
are to be found in many of his subsequent pieces. It 
assured him, however, of his own strength, and dis- 
closed to him the mode in which he should best hit 
the popular taste. " I have no occasion to study 
Plautus or Terence any longer," said he: "I must 
henceforth study the world." The world, accordingly, 
was his study; and the exquisite models of character 
which it furnished him will last as long as it shall 
endure. 

In 1660 he brought out the excellent comedy of the 
Ecole des Maris, and in the course of the same month, 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 349 

that of the Facheux, in three acts, — composed, learned, 
and performed within the brief space of a fortnight; an 
expedition evincing the dexterity of the manager no 
less than that of the author. This piece was written at 
the request of Fouquet, superintendent of finances to 
Louis the Fourteenth, for the magnificent fete at Vaux, 
given by him to that monarch, and lavishly celebrated 
in the memoirs of the period, and with yet more ele- 
gance in a poetical epistle of La Fontaine to his friend 
De Maucroix. This minister had been intrusted with 
the principal care of the finances under Cardinal Maza- 
rin, and had been continued in the same office by 
Louis the Fourteenth, on his own assumption of the 
government. The monarch, however, alarmed at the 
growing dilapidations of the revenue, requested from 
the superintendent an expose of its actual condition, 
which, on receiving, he privately communicated to 
Colbert, the rival and successor of Fouquet. The 
latter, whose ordinary expenditure far exceeded that 
of any other subject in the kingdom, and who, in ad- 
dition to immense sums occasionally lost at play and 
daily squandered on his debaucheries, is said to have 
distributed in pensions more than four millions of 
livres annually, thought it would be an easy matter 
to impose on a young and inexperienced prince, who 
had hitherto shown himself more devoted to pleasure 
than business, and accordingly gave in false returns, 
exaggerating the expenses, and diminishing the actual 
receipts of the treasury. The detection of this pecu- 
lation determined Louis to take the first occasion of 
dismissing his powerful minister; but his ruin was pre- 
cipitated and completed by the discovery of an indis- 

30 



35 o BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

creet passion for Madame de la Valliere, whose fasci- 
nating graces were then beginning to acquire for her 
that ascendency over the youthful monarch which has 
since condemned her name to such unfortunate celeb- 
rity. The portrait of this lady, seen in the apartments 
of the favorite on the occasion to which we have ad- 
verted, so incensed Louis that he would have had him 
arrested on the spot but for the seasonable intervention 
of the queen-mother, who reminded him that Fouquet 
was his host. It was for xh\s>fete at Vaux, whose palace 
and ample domains, covering the extent of three vil- 
lages, had cost their proprietor the sum, almost in- 
credible for that period, of eighteen million livres, 
that Fouquet put in requisition all the various talents 
of the capital, the dexterity of its artists, and the in- 
vention of its finest poets. He was particularly lavish 
in his preparations for the dramatic portion of the 
entertainment. Le Brun passed for a while from his 
victories of Alexander to paint the theatrical decora- 
tions; Torelli was employed to contrive the machinery; 
Pelisson furnished the prologue, much admired in its 
day, and Moliere his comedy of the Facheux. 

This piece, the hint for which may have been sug- 
gested by Horace's ninth satire, Ibam forte via Sacra, 
is an amusing caricature of the various bores that infest 
society, rendered the more vexatious by their interven- 
tion at the very moment when a young lover is hasten- 
ing to the place of assignation with his mistress. Louis 
the Fourteenth, after the performance, seeing his mas- 
ter of the hunts near him, M. Soyecour, a personage 
remarkably absent, and inordinately devoted to the 
pleasures of the chase, pointed him out to Moliere as 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



35* 



an original whom he had omitted to bring upon his 
canvas. The poet took the hint, and the following 
day produced an excellent scene, where this Nimrod 
is made to go through the technics of his art, in which 
he had himself, with great complaisance, instructed the 
mischievous satirist, who had drawn him into a conver- 
sation for that very purpose on the preceding evening. 

This play was the origin of the cojnedie-ballet, after- 
wards so popular in France. The residence at Vaux 
brought Moliere more intimately in contact with the 
king and the court than he had before been ; and from 
this time may be dated the particular encouragement 
which he ever after received from this prince, and 
which eventually enabled him to triumph over the 
malice of his enemies. A few days after this magnifi- 
cent entertainment, Fouquet was thrown into prison, 
where he was suffered to languish the remainder of his 
days, "which," says the historian from whom we have 
gathered these details, "he terminated in sentiments of 
the most sincere piety /"* a termination by no means 
uncommon in France with that class of persons, of 
either sex, respectively, who have had the misfortune 
to survive their fortune or their beauty. 

In February, 1662, Moliere formed a matrimonial 
connection with Mademoiselle Bejart, a young come- 
dian of his company, who had been educated under his 
own eye, and whose wit and captivating graces had 
effectually ensnared the poet's heart, but for which he 
was destined to perform doleful penance the remainder 
of his life. The disparity of their ages — for the lady 

* Histoire de la Vie, etc., de La Fontaine, par M. Valckenaer. 
Paris, 1824. 



35 2 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



was hardly seventeen — might have afforded in itself a 
sufficient objection ; and he had no reason to flatter 
himself that she would remain uninfected by the per- 
nicious example of the society in which she had been 
educated, and of which he himself was not altogether 
an immaculate member. In his excellent comedy of 
the Ecole des Fe?nmes, brought forward the same year, 
the story turns upon the absurdity of an old man's 
educating a young woman for the purpose, at some 
future time, of marrying her, which wise plan is de- 
feated by the unseasonable apparition of a young lover, 
who in five minutes undoes what it had cost the veteran 
so many years to contrive. The pertinency of this 
moral to the poet's own situation shows how much 
easier it is to talk wisely than to act so. 

This comedy, popular as it was on its representation, 
brought upon the head of its author a tempest of parody, 
satire, and even slander, from those of his own craft who 
were jealous of his unprecedented success, and from 
those literary petits-maitres who still smarted with the 
stripes inflicted on them in some of his previous per- 
formances. One of this latter class, incensed at the 
applauses bestowed upon the piece on the night of its 
first representation, indignantly exclaimed, Ris done, 
parterre ! ris done ! ''Laugh then, pit, if you will !" 
and immediately quitted the theatre. 

Moliere was not slow in avenging himself of these 
interested criticisms, by means of a little piece entitled 
La Critique de V Ecole des Femmes, in which he brings 
forward the various objections made to his comedy 
and ridicules them with unsparing severity. These 
objections appear to have been chiefly of a verbal 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



353 



nature. A few such familiar phrases as tarte a la 
creme, enfans par V oreille, etc., gave particular offence 
to the purists of that day, and, in the prudish spirit of 
French criticism, have since been condemned by Vol- 
taire and La Harpe as unworthy of comedy. One of 
the personages introduced into the Critique is a mar- 
quis, who, when repeatedly interrogated as to the 
nature of his objections to the comedy, has no other 
answer to make than by his eternal tarte a la creme. 
The Due de Feuillade, a coxcomb of little brains but 
great pretension, was the person generally supposed to 
be here intended. The peer, unequal to an encounter 
of wits with his antagonist, resorted to a coarser rem- 
edy. Meeting Moliere one day in the gallery at Ver- 
sailles, he advanced as if to embrace him, — a civility 
which the great lords of that day occasionally con- 
descended to bestow upon their inferiors. As the 
unsuspecting poet inclined himself to receive the salute, 
the duke, seizing his head between his hands, rubbed 
it briskly against the buttons of his coat, repeating, at 
the same time, ''''Tarte a la crane, Monsieur, tarte a la 
crane." The king, on receiving intelligence of this 
affront, was highly indignant, and reprimanded the duke 
with great asperity. He at the same time encouraged 
Moliere to defend himself with his own weapons ; a 
privilege of which he speedily availed himself, in a 
caustic little satire in one act, entitled Impromptu de 
Versailles. "The marquis," he says in this piece, "is 
nowadays the droll (Je plaisant) of the comedy ; and 
as our ancestors always introduced a jester to furnish 
mirth for the audience, so we must have recourse to 
some ridiculous marquis to divert them." 

30* 



354 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



It is obvious that Moliere could never have main- 
tained this independent attitude if he had not been 
protected by the royal favor. Indeed, Louis was con- 
stant in giving him this protection ; and when, soon 
after this period, the character of Moliere was black- 
ened by the vilest imputations, the monarch testified 
his conviction of his innocence by publicly standing 
godfather to his child, — a tribute of respect equally 
honorable to the prince and the poet. The king, 
moreover, granted him a pension of a thousand livres 
annually, and to his company, which henceforth took 
the title of "comedians of the king," a pension of 
seven thousand. Our author received his pension as 
one of a long list of men of letters who experienced 
a similar bounty from the royal hand. " The curious 
estimate exhibited in this document of the relative 
merits of these literary stipendiaries affords a striking 
evidence that the decrees of contemporaries are not 
unfrequently to be reversed by posterity. The ob- 
solete Chapelain is there recorded "as the greatest 
French poet who has ever existed;" in consideration 
of which, his stipend amounted to three thousand 
livres, while Boileau's name, for which his satires had 
already secured an imperishable existence, is not even 
noticed ! It should be added, however, on the au- 
thority of Boileau, that Chapelain himself had the 
principal hand in furnishing this apocryphal scale of 
merit to the minister. 

In the month of September, 1665, Moliere produced 
his L? Amour Medecin, a comedie-ballet, in three acts, 
which from the time of its conception to that of its 
performance consumed only five days. This piece, 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



355 



although displaying no more than his usual talent for 
caustic raillery, is remarkable as affording the earliest 
demonstration of those direct hostilities upon the med- 
ical faculty which he maintained at intervals during 
the rest of his life, and which he may be truly said to 
have died in maintaining. In this he followed the 
example of Montaigne, who, in particular, devotes one 
of the longest chapters in his work to a tirade against 
the profession, which he enforces by all the ingenuity 
of his wit and his usual wealth of illustration. In 
this, also, Moliere was subsequently imitated by Le 
Sage, as every reader of Gil Bias will readily call to 
mind. Both Montaigne and Le Sage, however, like 
most other libellers of the healing art, were glad to 
have recourse to it in the hour of need. Not so with 
Moliere. His satire seems to. have been without affec- 
tation. Though an habitual valetudinarian, he relied 
almost wholly on the temperance of his diet for the 
re-establishment of his health. "What use do you 
make of your physician?" said the king to him one 
day. "We chat together, sire," said the poet: "he 
gives me his prescriptions ; I never follow them, and 
so I get well." 

An ample apology for this infidelity may be found in 
the state of the profession at that day, whose members 
affected to disguise a profound ignorance of the true 
principles of science under a pompous exterior, which, 
however it might impose upon the vulgar, could only 
bring them into deserved discredit with the better 
portion of the community. The physicians of that 
time are described as parading the streets of Paris on 
mules, dressed in a long robe and bands, holding their 



356 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

conversation in bad Latin, or, if they condescended to 
employ the vernacular, mixing it up with such a jargon 
of scholastic phrase and scientific technics as to render 
it perfectly unintelligible to vulgar ears. The follow- 
ing lines, cited by M. Taschereau, and written in good 
earnest at the time, seem to hit off most of these pecu- 
liarities : 

" Affecter un air pedantesque, 
Cracber du Grec et du Latin, 
Longue perruque, habit grotesque. 
De la fourrure et du satin, 
Tout cela reuni fait presque 
Ce qu'on appelle un medecin."* 

In addition to these absurdities, the physicians of 
that period exposed themselves to still farther derision 
by the contrariety of their opinions and the animosity 
with which they maintained them. The famous con- 
sultation in the case of Cardinal Mazarin was well 
known in its day, — one of his four medical attendants 
affirming the seat of his disorder to be the liver, an- 
other the lungs, a third the spleen, and a fourth the 
mesentery. Moliere's raillery, therefore, against em- 
pirics, in a profession where mistakes are so easily 
made, so difficult to be detected, and the only one in 
which they are irremediable, stands abundantly ex- 
cused from the censures which have been heaped upon 
it. Its effects were visible in the reform which in his 
own time it effected in their manners, if in nothing 

* A gait and air somewhat pedantic, 

And scarce to spit but Greek, or Latin; 

A long peruke and habit antic, 

Sometimes of fur, sometimes of satin, 

Form the receipt by which 'tis showed 

How to make doctors a la mode. 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



357 



farther. They assumed the dress of men of the world, 
and gradually adopted the popular forms of communi- 
cation ; an essential step to improvement, since nothing 
cloaks ignorance and empiricism more effectually with 
the vulgar than an affected use of learned phrase and 
a technical vocabulary. 

We are now arrived at that period of Moliere's ca- 
reer when he composed his Misanthrope, a play which 
some critics have esteemed his masterpiece, and which 
all concur in admiring, as one of the noblest produc- 
tions of the modern drama. Its literary execution, 
too, of paramount importance in the eye of a French 
critic, is more nicely elaborated than in any other of 
the pieces of Moliere, if we except the Tartujfe, and 
its didactic dialogue displays a maturity of thought 
equal to what is found in the best satires of Boileau. 
It is the very didactic tone of this comedy, indeed, 
which, combined with its want of eager, animating 
interest, made it less popular on its representation than 
some of his inferior pieces. A circumstance which 
occurred on the first night of its performance may be 
worth noticing. In the second scene of the first act, 
a man of fashion, it is well known, is represented as 
soliciting the candid opinion of Alceste on a sonnet of 
his own inditing, though he flies into a passion with 
him, five minutes after, for pronouncing an unfavor- 
able judgment. This sonnet was so artfully constructed 
by Moliere, with those dazzling epigrammatic points 
most captivating to common ears, that the gratified 
audience were loud in their approbation of what they 
supposed intended in good faith by the author. How 
great was their mortification, then, when they heard 



353 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



Alceste condemn the whole as puerile, and fairly ex- 
pose the false principles on which it had been con- 
structed ! Such a rebuke must have carried more weight 
with it than a volume of set dissertation on the princi- 
ples of taste. 

Rousseau has bitterly inveighed against Moliere for 
exposing to ridicule the hero of his Misanthrope, a 
high-minded and estimable character. It was told to 
the Due de Montausier, well known for his austere 
virtue, that he was intended as the original of the 
character. Much offended, he attended a representa- 
tion of the piece, but, on returning, declared that "he 
dared hardly flatter himself the poet had intended 
him so great an honor." This fact, as has been well 
intimated by La Harpe, furnishes the best reply to 
Rousseau's invective. 

The relations in which Moliere stood with his wife 
at the time of the appearance of this comedy gave to 
the exhibition a painful interest. The levity and ex- 
travagance of this lady had for some time transcended 
even those liberal limits which were conceded at that 
day by the complaisance of a French husband, and 
they deeply affected the happiness of the poet. As 
he one day communicated the subject to his friend 
Chapelle, the latter strongly urged him to confine her 
person, — a remedy much in vogue then for refractory 
wives, and one, certainly, if not more efficacious, at 
least more gallant than the "moderate flagellation" 
authorized by the English law. He remonstrated on 
the folly of being longer the dupe of her artifices. 
"Alas !" said the unfortunate poet to him, "you have 
never loved!" A separation, however, was at length 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



359 



agreed upon, and it was arranged that, while both par- 
ties occupied the same house, they should never meet 
except at the theatre. The respective parts which they 
performed in this piece corresponded precisely with 
their respective situations : that of Celimene, a fasci- 
nating, capricious coquette, insensible to every re- 
monstrance of her lover, and selfishly bent on the 
gratification of her own appetites; and that of Alceste, 
perfectly sensible of the duplicity of his mistress, 
whom he vainly hopes to reform, and no less so of the 
un worthiness of his own passion, from which he as 
vainly hopes to extricate himself. The coincidences 
are too exact to be considered wholly accidental. 

If Moliere in his preceding pieces had hit the follies 
and fashionable absurdities of the age, in the Tartuffe 
he flew at still higher game, the most odious of all 
vices, religious hypocrisy. The result showed that his 
shafts were not shot in the dark. The first three acts 
of the Tartuffe, the only ones then written, made their 
appearance at the memorable fetes known under the 
name of " The Pleasures of the Enchanted Isle," given 
by Louis the Fourteenth at Versailles in 1664, and of 
which the inquisitive reader may find a circumstantial 
narrative in the twenty-fifth chapter of Voltaire's his- 
tory of that monarch. The only circumstance which 
can give them a permanent value with posterity is their 
having been the occasion of the earliest exhibition of 
this inimitable comedy. Louis the Fourteenth, who, 
notwithstanding the defects of his education, seems to 
have had a discriminating perception of literary beauty, 
was fully sensible of the merits of this production. The 
Tartuffes, however, who were present at the exhibition, 



360 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

deeply stung by the sarcasms of the poet, like the foul 
birds of night whose recesses have been suddenly in- 
vaded by a glare of light, raised a fearful cry against 
him, until Louis even, whose solicitude for the interests 
of the Church was nowise impaired by his own personal 
derelictions, complied with their importunities for im- 
posing a prohibition on the public performance of the 
play. 

It was, however, privately acted in the presence of 
Monsieur, and afterwards of the great Conde. Copies 
of it were greedily circulated in the societies of Paris; 
and, although their unanimous suffrage was an inade- 
quate compensation to the author for the privations he 
incurred, it was sufficient to quicken the activity of the 
false zealots, who, under the mask of piety, assailed 
him with the grossest libels. One of them even ven- 
tured so far as to call upon the king to make a public 
example of him with fire and fagot ; another declared 
that it would be an offence to the Deity to allow 
Moliere, after such an enormity, " to participate in 
the sacraments, to be admitted to confession, or even 
to enter the precincts of a church, considering the 
anathemas which it had fulminated against the authors 
of indecent and sacrilegious spectacles!" Soon after 
his sentence of prohibition, the king attended the per- 
formance of a piece entitled Scaramouche Hermite, a 
piece abounding in passages the most indelicate and 
profane. "What is the reason," said he, on retiring, 
to the Prince of Conde, " that the persons so sensibly 
scandalized at Moliere's comedy take no umbrage at 
this?" "Because," said the prince, "the latter only 
attacks religion, while the former attacks themselves;" 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



361 



an answer which may remind one of a remark of Bayle in 
reference to the Decameron, which, having been placed 
on the Index on account of its immorality, was, however, 
allowed to be published in an edition which converted 
the names of the ecclesiastics into those of laymen ; "a 
concession," says the philosopher, "which shows the 
priests to have been much more solicitous for the in- 
terests of their own order than for those of heaven." 

Louis, at length convinced of the interested motives 
of the enemies of the Tartuffe, yielded to the importu- 
nities of the public and removed his prohibition of its 
performance. It accordingly was represented, for the 
first time in public, in August, 1667, before an over- 
flowing house, extended to its full complement of five 
acts, but with alterations of the names of the piece, 
the principal personages in it, and some of its most ob- 
noxious passages. It was entitled The Impostor, and its 
hero was styled Panulfe. On the second evening of 
the performance, however, an interdict arrived from 
the president of the Parliament against the repetition 
of the performance, and, as the king had left Paris in 
order to join his army in Flanders, no immediate re- 
dress was to be obtained. It was not until two years 
later, 1669, that the Tartuffe, in its present shape, was 
finally allowed to proceed unmolested in its representa- 
tions. It is scarcely necessary to add that these were 
attended with the most brilliant success which its 
author could have anticipated, and to which the in- 
trinsic merits of the piece, and the unmerited persecu- 
tions he had undergone, so well entitled him. Forty- 
four successive representations were scarcely sufficient 
to satisfy the eager curiosity of the public ; and his 
Q 3 1 



362 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

grateful company forced upon Moliere a double share 
of the profits during every repetition of its performance 
for the remainder of his life. Posterity has confirmed 
the decision of his contemporaries, and it still remains 
the most admired comedy of the French theatre, and 
will always remain so, says a native critic, "as long 
as taste and hypocrites shall endure in France." 

We have been thus particular in our history of these 
transactions, as it affords one of the most interesting 
examples on record of undeserved persecution with 
which envy and party spirit have assailed a man of 
letters. No one of Moliere's compositions is deter- 
mined by a more direct moral aim ; nowhere has he 
stripped the mask from vice with a more intrepid 
hand ; nowhere has he animated his discourses with a 
more sound and practical piety. It should be added, 
in justice to the French clergy of that period, that the 
most eminent prelates at the court acknowledged the 
merits of this comedy, and were strongly in favor of 
its representation. 

It is generally known that the amusing scene in the 
first act, where Dorine enlarges so eloquently on the 
good cheer which Tartuffe had made in the absence of 
his host, was suggested to Moliere some years previous 
in Lorraine, by a circumstance which took place at the 
table of Louis the Fourteenth, whom Moliere had ac- 
companied in his capacity of valet de cha,77ibre. Pere- 
fixe, bishop of Rhodez, entering while the king was at 
his evening meal, during Lent, was invited by him to 
follow his example ; but the bishop declined, on the 
ground that he was accustomed to eat only once during 
the days of vigil and fast. The king, observing one 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. ^l 

of his attendants to smile, inquired of him the reason 
as soon as the prelate had withdrawn. The latter in- 
formed his master that he need be under no apprehen- 
sions for the health of the good bishop, as he himself 
had assisted at his dinner on that day, and then re- 
counted to him the various dishes which had been 
served up. The king, who listened with becoming 
gravity to the narration, uttered an exclamation of 
"Poor man !" at the specification of each new item, 
varying the tone of his exclamation in such a manner 
as to give it a highly comic effect. The humor was 
not lost upon our poet, who has transported the same 
ejaculations, with much greater effect, into the above- 
mentioned scene of his play. The king, who did not 
at first recognize the source whence he had derived it, 
on being informed of it, was much pleased, if we may 
believe M. Taschereau, in finding himself even thus 
accidentally associated with the work of a man of 
genius. 

In 1668, Moliere brought forward his Avare, and in 
the following year his amusing comedy of the Bow-geois 
Gentilhomme, in which the folly of unequal alliances is 
successfully ridiculed and exposed. This play was first 
represented in the presence of the court at Chambord. 
The king maintained during its performance an in- 
scrutable physiognomy, which made it doubtful what 
might be his real sentiments respecting it. The same 
deportment was maintained by him during the evening 
towards the author, who was in attendance in his ca- 
pacity of valet de chambre. The quick-eyed courtiers, 
the counts and marquises, who had so often smarted 
under the lash of the poet, construing this into an 



364 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

expression of royal disapprobation, were loud in their 
condemnation of him, and a certain duke boldly 
affirmed "that he was fast sinking into his second 
childhood, and that, unless some better writer soon 
appeared, French comedy would degenerate into mere 
Italian farce." The unfortunate poet, unable to catch 
a single ray of consolation, was greatly depressed 
during the interval of five days which preceded the 
second representation of his piece ; on returning from 
which, the monarch assured him that "none of his 
productions had afforded him greater entertainment, 
and that, if he had delayed expressing his opinion on 
the preceding night, it was from the apprehension that 
his judgment might have been influenced by the excel- 
lence of the acting." Whatever we may think of this 
exhibition of royal caprice, we must admire the supple- 
ness of the courtiers, one and all of whom straightway 
expressed their full conviction of the merits of the 
comedy, and the duke above mentioned added, in par- 
ticular, that "there was a vis co7iiica in all that Mo- 
liere ever wrote, to which the ancients could furnish no 
parallel!" What exquisite studies for his pencil must 
Moliere not have found in this precious assembly! 

We have already remarked that the profession of a 
comedian was but lightly esteemed in France at this 
period. Moliere experienced the inconveniences re- 
sulting from this circumstance even after his splendid 
literary career had given him undoubted claims to 
consideration. Most of our readers, no doubt, are 
acquainted with the anecdote of Belloc, an agreeable 
poet of the court, who, on hearing one of the servants 
in the royal household refuse to aid the author of the 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 365 

Tartuffe in making the king's bed, courteously re- 
quested "the poet to accept his services for that pur- 
pose." Madame Campan's anecdote of a similar 
courtesy on the part of Louis the Fourteenth is also 
well known, who, when several of these functionaries 
refused to sit at table with the comedian, kindly in- 
vited him to sit down with him, and, calling in some 
of his principal courtiers, remarked that "he had re- 
quested the pleasure of Moliere's company at his own 
table, as it was not thought quite good enough for his 
officers." This rebuke had the desired effect. How- 
ever humiliating the reflection may be that genius 
should have, at any time, stood in need of such pa- 
tronage, it is highly honorable to the monarch who 
could raise himself so far above the prejudices of his 
age as to confer it. 

It was the same unworthy prejudice that had so long 
excluded Moliere from that great object and recom- 
pense of a French scholar's ambition, a seat in the 
Academy; a body affecting to maintain a jealous watch 
over the national language and literature, which the 
author of the Misanthrope and the Tartuffe, perhaps 
more than any other individual of his age, had con- 
tributed to purify and advance. Sensible of this merit, 
they at length offered him a place in their assembly, 
provided he would renounce his profession of a player 
and confine himself in future to his literary labors. 
But the poet replied to his friend Boileau, the bearer 
of this communication, that "too many individuals 
of his company depended on his theatrical labors for 
support to allow him for a moment to think of it;" a 
reply of infinitely more service to his memory than all 

31* 



366 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

the academic honors that could have been heaped upon 
him. This illustrious body, however, a century after 
his decease, paid him the barren compliment (the only 
one then in their power) of decreeing to him an eloge, 
and of admitting his bust within their walls, with this 
inscription upon it : 

" Nothing is wanting to his glory: he was wanting to ours." 

The catalogue of Academicians contemporary with 
Moliere, most of whom now rest in sweet oblivion, or, 
with Cotin and Chapelain, live only in the satires of 
Boileau, shows that it is as little in the power of acad- 
emies to confer immortality on a writer as to deprive 
him of it. 

We have not time to notice the excellent comedy of 
the Fe?nmes Savantes, and some inferior pieces, written 
by our author at a later period of his life, and must 
hasten to the closing scene. He had been long affected 
by a pulmonary complaint, and it was only by severe 
temperance, as we have before stated, that he- was en- 
abled to preserve even a moderate degree of health. 
At the commencement of the year 1673 his malady 
sensibly increased. At this very season he composed 
his Malade Imaginaire , — the most whimsical, and per- 
haps the most amusing, of the compositions in which 
he has indulged his raillery against the faculty. On 
the seventeenth of February, being the day appointed 
for its fourth representation, his friends would have 
dissuaded him from appearing, in consequence of his 
increasing indisposition ; but he persisted in his de- 
sign, alleging "that more than fifty poor individuals 
depended for their daily bread on its performance." 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



3 6 7 



His life fell a sacrifice to his benevolence. The exer- 
tions which he was compelled to make in playing the 
principal part of Argan aggravated his distemper, and 
as he was repeating the word juro in the concluding 
ceremony he fell into a convulsion, which he vainly 
endeavored to disguise from the spectators under a 
forced smile. He was immediately carried to his house 
in the Rue de Richelieu, now No. 34. A violent fit 
of coughing, on his arrival, occasioned the rupture of 
a blood-vessel ; and, seeing his end approaching, he 
sent for two ecclesiastics of the parish of St. Eustace, 
to which he belonged, to administer to him the last 
offices of religion. But these worthy persons refused 
their assistance; and before a third, who had been 
sent for, could arrive, Moliere, suffocated with the 
effusion of blood, had expired in the arms of his 
family. 

Harlay de Champvalon, at that time Archbishop of 
Paris, refused the rites of sepulture to the deceased 
poet because he was a comedian and had had the 
misfortune to die without receiving the sacraments. 
This prelate is conspicuous, even in the chronicles of 
that period, for his bold and infamous debaucheries. 
It is of him that Madame de Sevigne observes, in 
one of her letters, "There are two little inconveniences 
which make it difficult for any one to undertake his 
funeral oration, — his life and his death." Father Gail- 
lard, who at length consented to undertake it, did so 
on the condition that he should not be required to say 
any thing of the character of the deceased. The re- 
monstrance of Louis the Fourteenth having induced 
this person to remove his interdict, he privately in- 



368 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

structed the curate of St. Eustace not to allow the 
usual service for the dead to be recited at the inter- 
ment. On the day appointed for this ceremony, a 
number of the rabble assembled before the deceased 
poet's door, determined to oppose it. ''They knew 
only," says Voltaire, "that Moliere was a comedian, 
but did not know that he was a philosopher and a great 
man." They had, more probably, been collected to- 
gether by the Tartuffes, his unforgiving enemies. The 
widow of the poet appeased these wretches by throw- 
ing money to them from the windows. In the evening, 
the body, escorted by a procession of about a hundred 
individuals, the friends and intimate acquaintances of 
the deceased poet, each of them bearing a flambeau in 
his hand, was quietly deposited in the cemetery of St. 
Joseph, without the ordinary chant, or service of any 
kind. It was not thus that Paris followed to the tomb 
the remains of her late distinguished comedian, Talma. 
Yet Talma was only a comedian, while Moliere, in 
addition to this, had the merit of being the most emi- 
nent comic writer whom France had ever produced. 
The different degree of popular civilization which this 
difference of conduct indicates may afford a subject of 
contemplation by no means unpleasing to the philan- 
thropist. 

In the year 1792, during that memorable period 
in France when an affectation of reverence for their 
illustrious dead was strangely mingled with the perse- 
cution of the living, the Parisians resolved to exhume 
the remains of La Fontaine and Moliere, in order to 
transport them to a more honorable place of interment. 
Of the relics thus obtained, it is certain that no portion 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 369 

belonged to La Fontaine, and it is extremely probable 
that none did to Moliere. Whosesoever they may have 
been, they did not receive the honors for which their 
repose had been disturbed. With the usual fickleness 
of the period, they were shamefully transferred from 
one place to another, or abandoned to neglect, for 
seven years, when the patriotic conservator of the 
Monumens Fran^ais succeeded in obtaining them for 
his collection at the Petits Augustins. On the sup- 
pression of this institution in 181 7, the supposed ashes 
of the two poets were, for the last time, transported to 
the spacious cemetery of Pere de la Chaise, where the 
tomb of the author of the Tartuffe is designated by an 
inscription in Latin, which, as if to complete the scan- 
dal of the proceedings, is grossly mistaken in the only 
fact which it pretends to record, namely, the age of 
the poet at the time of his decease. 

Moliere died soon after entering upon his fifty-second 
year. He is represented to have been somewhat above 
the middle stature, and well proportioned ; his features 
large, his complexion dark, and his black, bushy eye- 
brows so flexible as to admit of his giving an infinitely 
comic expression to his physiognomy. He was the 
best actor of his own generation, and, by his counsels, 
formed the celebrated Baron, the best of the succeed- 
ing. He played all the range of his own characters, 
from Alceste to Sganarelle, though he seems to have 
been peculiarly fitted for broad comedy. He com- 
posed with rapidity, for which Boileau has happily 
complimented him : 

" Rare et sublime esprit, dont la fertile vein 
Ignore en ecrivant le travail et la peine ;" 
Q* 



37° 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



unlike in this to Boileau himself, and to Racine, the 
former of whom taught the latter, if Ave may credit his 
son, " the art of rhyming with difficulty." Of course, 
the verses of Moliere have neither the correctness nor 
the high finish of those of his two illustrious rivals. 

He produced all his pieces, amounting to thirty, in 
the short space of fifteen years. He was in the habit 
of reading these to an old female domestic by the name 
of La Foret, on whose unsophisticated judgment he 
greatly relied. On one occasion, when he attempted 
to impose upon her the production of a brother author, 
she plainly told him that he had never written it. Sir 
Walter Scott may have had this habit of Moliere's in his 
mind when he introduced a similar expedient into his 
" Chronicles of the Canongate." For the same reason, 
our poet used to request the comedians to bring their 
children with them when he recited a new play. The 
peculiar advantage of this humble criticism in dramatic 
compositions is obvious. Alfieri himself, as he informs 
us, did not disdain to resort to it. 

Moliere's income was very ample, probably not less 
than twenty-five or thirty thousand francs, — an immense 
sum for that day ; yet he left but little property. The 
expensive habits of his wife and his own liberality may 
account for it. One example of this is worth recording, 
as having been singularly opportune and well directed. 
When Racine came up to Paris as a young adventurer, 
he presented to Moliere a copy of his first crude tragedy, 
long since buried in oblivion. The latter discerned in it, 
amid all its imperfections, the latent spark of dramatic 
genius, and he encouraged its author by the present of 
a hundred louis. This was doing better for him than 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



37 r 



Corneille did, who advised the future author of Phedre 
to abandon the tragic walk and to devote himself alto- 
gether to comedy. Racine recompensed this benefac- 
tion of his friend, at a later period of his life, by 
quarrelling with him. 

Moliere was naturally of a reserved and taciturn 
temper, insomuch that his friend Boileau used to call 
him the Contemftlateur. Strangers who had expected 
to recognize in his conversation the sallies of wit which 
distinguished his dramas went away disappointed. The 
same thing is related of La Fontaine. The truth is, 
that Moliere went into society as a spectator, not as an 
actor ; he found there the studies for the characters 
which he was to transport upon the stage, and he 
occupied himself with observing them. The dreamer 
La Fontaine lived, too, in a world of his own creation. 
His friend Madame de la Sabliere paid to him this 
untranslatable compliment: "En verite, mon cher La 
Fontaine, vous seriez bien bete, si vous n'aviez pas tant 
d'esprit." These unseasonable reveries brought him. 
it may be imagined, into many whimsical adventures. 
The great Corneille, too, was distinguished by the same 
apathy. A gentleman dined at the same table with him 
for six months without suspecting the author of the 
"Cid." 

The literary reputation of Moliere, and his amiable 
personal endowments, naturally led him into an inti- 
macy with the most eminent wits of the golden age in 
which he lived, but especially with Boileau, La Fontaine, 
and Racine ; and the confidential intercourse of these 
great minds, and their frequent reunions for the pur- 
poses of social pleasure, bring to mind the similar 



372 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



associations at the Mermaid's, Will's Coffee-house, 
and Button's, which form so pleasing a picture in the 
annals of English literature. It was common on these 
occasions to have a volume of the unfortunate Chape- 
Iain's epic, then in popular repute, lie open upon the 
table, and if one of the party fell into a grammatical 
blunder, to impose upon him the reading of some 
fifteen or twenty verses of it: "a whole page," says 
Louis Racine, "was sentence of death." La Fontaine, 
in his Psyche, has painted his reminiscences of these 
happy meetings in the coloring of fond regret ; where, 
" freely discussing such topics of general literature or 
personal gossip as might arise, they touched lightly 
upon all, like bees passing on from flower to flower, 
criticising the works of others without envy, and of 
one another, when any one chanced to fall into the 
malady of the age, with frankness. ' ' Alas that so rare 
a union of minds, destined to live together through all 
ages, should have been dissolved by the petty jealousies 
incident to common men ! 

In these assemblies frequent mention is made of 
Chapelle, the most intimate friend of Moliere, whose 
agreeable verses are read with pleasure in our day, and 
whose cordial manners and sprightly conversation 
made him the delight of his own. His mercurial 
spirits, however, led him into too free an indulgence 
of convivial pleasures, and brought upon him the re- 
peated though unavailing remonstrances of his friends. 
On one of these occasions, as Boileau was urging upon 
him the impropriety of this indulgence, and its inevi- 
table consequences, Chapelle, who received the admo- 
nition with great contrition, invited his Mentor to 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



373 



withdraw from the public street in which they were 
then walking into a neighboring house, where they 
could talk over the matter with less interruption. 
Here wine was called for, and, in the warmth of dis- 
cussion, a second bottle being soon followed by a 
third, both parties at length found themselves in a 
condition which made it advisable to adjourn the lec- 
ture to a more fitting occasion. 

Moliere enjoyed also the closest intimacy with the 
great Conde, the most distinguished ornament of the 
court Of Louis the Fourteenth; to such an extent, in- 
deed, that the latter directed that the poet should never 
be refused admission to him, at whatever hour he might 
choose to pay his visit. His regard for his friend was 
testified by his remark, rather more candid than cour- 
teous, to an abbe of his acquaintance, who had brought 
him an epitaph of his own writing upon the deceased 
poet. "Would to Heaven," said the prince, "that he 
were in a condition to bring me yours i" 

We have already wandered beyond the limits which 
we had assigned to ourselves for an abstract of Mo- 
Here's literary labors and of the most interesting anec- 
dotes in his biography. Without entering, therefore, 
into a criticism on his writings, of which the public 
stand in no need, we shall dismiss the subject with a 
few brief reflections on their probable influence, and 
on the design of the author in producing them. 

The most distinguished French critics, with the 
overweening partiality in favor of their own nation, 
so natural and so universal, placing Moliere by com- 
mon consent at the head of their own comic writers, 
have also claimed for him a pre-eminence over those 

32 



374 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



of every other age and country. A. W. Schlegel, a 
very competent judge in these matters, has degraded 
him, on the other hand, from the walks of high comedy 
to the writer of "buffoon farces, for which his genius 
and inclination seem to have essentially fitted him;" 
adding, moreover, that "his characters are not drawn 
from nature, but from the fleeting and superficial forms 
of fashionable life." This is a hard sentence, accom- 
modated to the more forcible illustration of the pe- 
culiar theory which the German writer has avowed 
throughout his work, and which, however reasonable 
in its first principles, has led him into as exaggerated 
an admiration of the romantic models which he pre- 
fers, as disparagement of the classical school which he 
detests. It is a sentence, moreover, upon which some 
eminent critics in his own country, who support his 
theory in the main, have taken the liberty to demur. 

That a large proportion of Moliere's pieces are con- 
ceived in a vein of broad, homely merriment, rather 
than in that of elevated comedy, abounding in forced 
situations, high caricature, and practical jokes ; in the 
knavish, intriguing valets of Plautus and Terence ; in 
a compound of that good nature and irritability, 
shrewdness and credulity, which make up the dupes 
of Aristophanes, is very true ; but that a writer dis- 
tinguished by his deep reflection, his pure taste, and 
nice observation of character should have preferred 
this to the higher walks of his art, is absolutely incred- 
ible. He has furnished the best justification of him- 
self in an apology which a contemporary biographer 
reports him to have made to some one who censured 
him on this very ground: "If I wrote simply for 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



375 



fame," said he, "I should manage very differently; 
but I write for the support of my company. I must 
not address myself, therefore, to a few people of edu- 
cation, but to the mob. And this latter class of 
gentry take very little interest in a continued elevation 
of style and sentiment." With all these imperfections 
and lively absurdities, however, there is scarcely one 
of Moliere's minor pieces which does not present us 
with traits of character that come home to every heart, 
and felicities of expression that, from their truth, have 
come to be proverbial. 

With regard to the objection that his characters are 
not so much drawn from nature as from the local man- 
ners of the age, if it be meant that they are not acted 
upon by those deep passions which engross the whole 
soul, and which, from this intensity, have more of a 
tragic than a comic import in them, but are rather 
drawn from the foibles and follies of ordinary life, it 
is true ; but then these last are likely to be quite as 
permanent, and, among civilized nations, quite as uni- 
versal, as the former. And who has exposed them with 
greater freedom or with a more potent ridicule than 
Moliere ? Love, under all its thousand circumstances, 
its quarrels and reconciliations; vanity, humbly suing 
for admiration under the guise of modesty; whimsical 
contradictions of profession and habitual practice; the 
industry with which the lower classes ape, not the vir- 
tues, but the follies of their superiors; the affectation 
of fashion, taste, science, or any thing but what the 
party actually possesses ; the esprit de corps, which 
leads us to feel an exalted respect for our own profes- 
sion and a sovereign contempt for every other; the 



376 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

friendly adviser, who has an eye to his own interest ; 
the author, who seeks your candid opinion, and quar- 
rels with you when you have given it ; the fair friend, 
who kindly sacrifices your reputation for a jest ; the 
hypocrite under every aspect, who deceives the world 
or himself, — these form the various and motley pano- 
rama of character which Moliere has transferred to his 
canvas, and which, though mostly drawn from culti- 
vated life, must endure as long as society shall hold 
together. 

Indeed, Moliere seems to have possessed all the 
essential requisites for excelling in genteel comedy : a 
pure taste, an acute perception of the ridiculous, the 
tone of elegant dialogue, and a wit brilliant and un- 
tiring as Congreve's, but which, instead of wasting 
itself, like his, in idle flashes of merriment, is uniformly 
directed with a moral or philosophical aim. This ob- 
vious didactic purpose, in truth, has been censured 
as inconsistent with the spirit of the drama, and as 
belonging rather to satire ; but it secured to him an 
influence over the literature and the opinions of his 
own generation which has been possessed by no other 
comic writer of the moderns. 

He was the first to recall his countrymen from the 
vapid hyperbole and puerile conceits of the ancient 
farces, and to instruct them in the maxim which 
Boileau has since condensed into a memorable verse, 
that "nothing is beautiful but what is natural." We 
have already spoken of the reformation which one of 
his early pieces effected in the admirers of the Hotel de 
Rambouillet and its absurdities ; and when this confed- 
eracy afterwards rallied under an affectation of science, 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



377 



as it had before done of letters, he again broke it with 
his admirable satire of the Femmes Savantes. We do 
not recollect any similar revolution effected by a single 
effort of genius, unless it be that brought about by the 
Baviad and Mceviad. But Mr. Gifford, in the Della- 
Cruscan school, but "broke a butterfly upon the wheel," 
in comparison with those enemies, formidable by rank 
and talent, whom Moliere assailed. We have noticed 
in its proper place the influence which his writings had 
in compelling the medical faculty of his day to lay 
aside the affected deportment, technical jargon, and 
other mummeries then in vogue, by means of the public 
derision to which he had deservedly exposed them. 
In the same manner, he so successfully ridiculed the 
miserable dialectics, pedantry, and intolerance of the 
schoolmen, in his diverting dialogues between Dr. 
Marphurius and Dr. Pancrace, that he is said to have 
completely defeated the serious efforts of the Uni- 
versity for obtaining a confirmation of the decree of 
1624, which had actually prohibited, under pain of 
death, the promulgation of any opinion contrary to 
the doctrines of Aristotle. The arret burlesque of his 
friend Boileau, at a later period, if we may trust the 
Menagiatia, had a principal share in preventing a 
decree of the Parliament against the philosophy of 
Descartes. It is difficult to estimate the influence of 
our poet's satire on the state of society in general, and 
on those higher ranks in particular whose affectations 
and pretensions he assailed with such pertinacious hos- 
tility. If he did not reform them, he at least deprived 
them of their fascination and much of their mischiev- 
ous influence, by holding them up to the contempt 

32* 



378 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

and laughter of the public. Sometimes, it must be 
admitted, though very rarely, in effecting this object 
he so far transgressed the bounds of decorum as to 
descend even to personalities. 

From this view of the didactic purpose proposed by 
Moliere in his comedies, it is obviously difficult to 
institute a comparison between them and those of our 
English dramatists, or, rather, of Shakspeare, who may 
be taken as their representative. The latter seems to 
have had no higher end in view than mere amusement : 
he took a leaf out of the great volume of human nature 
as he might find it ; nor did he accommodate it to 
the illustration of any moral or literary theorem. The 
former, on the other hand, manifests such a direct 
perceptive purpose as to give to some of his pieces the 
appearance of satires rather than of comedies ; argu- 
ment takes the place of action, and the pro and con 
of the matter are discussed with all the formality of a 
school exercise. This essentially diminishes the inter- 
est of some of his best plays, the Misanthrope and the 
Femmes Savantes for example, which for this reason 
seem better fitted for the closet than the stage, and 
have long since ceased to be favorites with the public. 
This want of interest is, moreover, aggravated by the 
barrenness of action visible in many of Moliere's come- 
dies, where he seems only to have sought an apology for 
bringing together his coteries of gentlemen and ladies 
for the purpose of exhibiting their gladiatorial dexterity 
in conversation. Not so with the English dramatist, 
whose boundless invention crowds his scene with inci- 
dents that hurry us along with breathless interest, but 
which sadly scandalize the lover of the unities. 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



379 



In conformity with his general plan, too, Shakspeare 
brings before us every variety of situation, — the court, 
the camp, and the cloister ; the busy hum of populous 
cities, or the wild solitude of the forest, — presenting us 
with pictures of rich and romantic beauty which could 
not fall within the scope of his rival, and allowing him- 
self to indulge in the unbounded revelry of an imagina- 
tion which Moliere did not possess. The latter, on the 
other hand, an attentive observer of man as he is found 
in an over-refined state of society, in courts and crowded 
capitals, copied his minutest lineaments with a precision 
that gives to his most general sketches the air almost of 
personal portraits ; seasoning, moreover, his discourses 
with shrewd hints and maxims of worldly policy. Shak- 
speare' s genius led him rather to deal in bold touches 
than in this nice delineation. He describes classes rather 
than individuals ; he touches the springs of the most 
intense passions. The daring of ambition, the craving 
of revenge, the deep tenderness of love, are all mate- 
rials in his hands for comedy; and this gives to some 
of his admired pieces — his "Merchant of Venice" and 
his " Measure for Measure," for example — a solemnity 
of coloring that leaves them only to be distinguished 
from tragedy by their more fortunate termination. 
Moliere, on the contrary, sedulously excludes from his 
plays whatever can impair their comic interest. And 
when, as he has done very rarely, he aims directly at 
vice instead of folly (in the Tarluffe, for instance), he 
studies to exhibit it under such ludicrous points of view 
as shall excite the derision rather than the indignation 
of his audience. 

But, whatever be the comparative merits of these 



3 8o 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



great masters, each must be allowed to have attained 
complete success in his way. Comedy, in the hands 
of Shakspeare, exhibits to us man, not only as he is 
moved by the petty vanities of life, but by deep and 
tumultuous passion; in situations which it requires all 
the invention of the poet to devise and the richest 
coloring of eloquence to depict. But if the object of 
comedy, as has been said, be "to correct the follies of 
the age, by exposing them to ridicule," who then has 
equalled Moliere ? 



ITALIAN NARRATIVE POETRY.* 

(October, 1824.) 

The characteristics of an Italian school are nowhere 
so discernible in English literary history as under the 
reign of Elizabeth. At the period when England was 
most strenuous in breaking off her spiritual relations 
with Italy, she cultivated most closely her intellectual. 
It is hardly necessary to name either the contemporary 
dramatists, or Surrey, Sidney, and Spenser, the former 
of whom derived the plots of many of their most pop- 
ular plays, as the latter did the forms, and frequently 
the spirit, of their poetical compositions, from Italian 
models. The translations of the same period were, 
in several instances, superior to any which have been 
since produced. Harrington's version of the "Orlando 
Furioso," with all its inaccuracy, is far superior to the 
cumbrous monotony of Hoole. Of Fairfax, the ele- 
gant translator of Tasso, it is enough to say that he 
is styled by Dryden "the poetical father of Waller," 
and quoted by him, in conjunction with Spenser, as 
"one of the great masters in our language." The 
popularity of the Italian was so great even in Ascham's 

* 1. "The Orlando Innamorato ; translated into prose and verse, 
from the Italian of Francesco Berni. By W. S. Rose." 8vo, pp. 
279. London, 1823. 

2. "The Orlando Furioso; translated into verse from the Italian 
of Ludovico Ariosto. By W. S. Rose." Vol. i., 8vo. London, 
1823. 

( 381 ) 



382 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

day, who did not survive the first half of Elizabeth's 
reign, as to draw from the learned schoolmaster much 
peevish animadversion upon what he terms "the en- 
chantments of Circe, fond books of late translated out 
of Italian into English, and sold in every shop in Lon- 
don." It gradually lost this wide authority during the 
succeeding century. This was but natural. Before 
the time of Elizabeth, all the light of learning which 
fell upon the world had come from Italy, and our own 
literature, like a young and tender plant, insensibly 
put forth its branches most luxuriantly in the direction 
whence it felt this invigorating influence. As it grew 
in years and hardihood, it sent its fibres deeper into 
its own soil, and drew thence the nourishment which 
enabled it to assume its fair and full proportions. Mil- 
ton, it is true, the brightest name on the poetical rec- 
ords of that period, cultivated it with eminent success. 
Any one acquainted with the writings of Dante, Pulci, 
and Tasso will understand the value and extent of Mil- 
ton's obligations to the Italian. He was far from de- 
siring to conceal them, and he has paid many a tribute 
"of melodious verse" to the sources from which he 
drew so much of the nourishment of his exalted genius. 
"To imitate, as he has done," in the language of 
Boileau, "is not to act the part of a plagiary, but of 
a rival." Milton is, moreover, one of the few writers 
who have succeeded so far in comprehending the nice- 
ties of foreign tongue as to be able to add something to 
its poetical wealth, and his Italian sonnets are written 
with such purity as to have obtained commendations 
from the Tuscan critics.* 

* Milton, in his treatise on The Reason of Church Government, 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



383 



Boileau, who set the current of French taste at this 
period, had a considerable contempt for that of his 
neighbors. He pointed one of his antithetical couplets 
at the "tinsel of Tasso" (" clinqua?it du Taste"*), and 
in another he ridiculed the idea of epics in which 
" the devil was always blustering against the heavens, "f 
The English admitted the sarcasm of Boileau with the 
cold commentary of Addison ;| and the "clinquant 
du Tasse" became a cant term of reproach upon the 
whole body of Italian letters. The French went still 
farther, and afterwards, applying the sarcasm of their 
critic to Milton as well as to Tasso, rejected both the 
poets upon the same principles. The French did the 
English as much justice as they did the Italians. No 
great change of opinion in this matter took place in 
England during the last century. The Wartons and 
Gray had a just estimation of this beautiful tongue, 
but Dr. Johnson, the dominant critic of that day, seems 
to have understood the language but imperfectly, and 
not to have much relished in it what he understood. 

In the present age of intellectual activity, attention 
is so generally bestowed on all modern languages which 
are ennobled by a literature, that it is not singular an 
acquaintance with the Italian in particular should be 
widely diffused. Great praise, however, is due to the 
labors of Mr. Roscoe. There can be little doubt that 

alludes modestly enough to his Italian pieces and the commendations 
bestowed upon them : " Other things, which I had shifted in scarcity 
of books and conveniencies to hatch up among them, were received 
with written encomiums, which the Italian is not forward to bestow 
on men of this side the Alps." 

* Satire IX. 

f L'Art poetique, c. iii. X Spectator, No. VI. 



3§4 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



his elaborate biographies of the Medici, which contain 
as much literary criticism as historical narrative, have 
mainly contributed to the promotion of these studies 
among his countrymen. These works have of late met 
with much flippant criticism in some of their leading 
journals. In Italy they have been translated, are now 
cited as authorities, and have received the most enco- 
miastic notices from several eminent scholars. These 
facts afford conclusive testimony of their merits. The 
name of Mathias is well known to every lover of the 
Italian tongue ; his poetical productions rank with 
those of Milton in merit, and far exceed them in 
quantity. To conclude, it is not many years since 
Cary gave to his countrymen his very extraordinary 
version of the father of Tuscan poetry, and Rose is 
now swelling the catalogue with translations of the two 
most distinguished chivalrous epics of Italy. 

Epic romance has continued to be a great favorite 
in that country ever since its first introduction into the 
polished circles of Florence and Ferrara, towards the 
close of the fifteenth century. It has held much the 
same rank in its ornamental literature which the drama 
once enjoyed in the English, and which historical 
novel-writing maintains now. It hardly seems credible 
that an enlightened people should long continue to 
take great satisfaction in poems founded on the same 
extravagant actions, and spun out to the appalling 
length of twenty, thirty, nay, forty cantos of a thou- 
sand verses each. But the Italians, like most Southern 
nations, delight exceedingly in the uncontrolled play 
of the imagination, and they abandon themselves to 
all its brilliant illusions, with no other object in view 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 385 

than mere recreation. An Englishman looks for a 
moral, or, at least, for some sort of instruction, from 
the wildest work of fiction. But an Italian goes to it 
as he would go to the opera, — to get impressions rather 
than ideas. He is extremely sensible to the fine tones 
of his native language, and, under the combined influ- 
ence produced by the coloring of a lavish fancy and 
the music of a voluptuous versification, he seldom stoops 
to a cold analysis of its purpose or its probability. 

Romantic fiction, however, which flourished so ex- 
uberantly under a warm Southern sky, was transplanted 
from the colder regions of Normandy and England. It 
is remarkable that both these countries, in which it had 
its origin, should have ceased to cultivate it at the very 
period when the perfection of their respective languages 
would have enabled them to do so with entire success. 
We believe this remark requires no qualification in 
regard to France. Spenser affords one illustrious ex- 
ception among the English.* 

* The influence, however, of the old Norman romances may be 
discovered in the productions of a much later period. Their incred- 
ible length required them to be broken up into fyttes, or cantos, by 
the minstrel, who recited them with the accompaniment of a harp, in 
the same manner as the epics of Homer, broken into rhapsodies, were 
chanted by the bards of Ionia. The minstrel who could thus beguile 
the tedium of a winter's evening was a welcome guest at the baronial 
castle and in the hall of the monastery. As Greek and Roman letters 
were revived, the legends of chivalry fell into disrepute, and the min- 
strel gradually retreated to the cottage of the peasant, who was still 
rude enough to relish his simple melody. But the long romance was 
beyond the comprehension or the taste of the rustic. It therefore 
gave way to less complicated narratives, and from its wreck may be 
fairly said to have arisen those Border songs and ballads which form 
the most beautiful collection of rural minstrelsy that belongs to any 
age or country. 

R 33 



3 S6 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

It was not until long after the extinction of this spe- 
cies of writing in the North that it reappeared in Italy. 
The commercial habits and the republican institutions 
of the Italians in- the twelfth and thirteenth centuries 
were most unfavorable to the spirit of chivalry, and, 
consequently, to the fables which grew out of it. The 
three patriarchs of their literature, moreover, by the 
light which, in this dark period, they threw over other 
walks of imagination, turned the attention of their 
countrymen from those of romance. Dante, indeed, 
who resembled Milton in so many other particulars, 
showed a similar predilection for the ancient tales of 
chivalry. His Commedia contains several encomiastic 
allusions to them ; but, like the English bard, he con- 
tented himself with these, and chose a subject better 
suited to his ambitious genius and inflexible temper.* 
His poem, it is true, was of too eccentric a character 
to be widely imitated,")" and both Boccaccio and Pe- 

* Milton's poetry abounds in references to the subjects of romantic 
fable; and in his " Epitaphium Damonis" he plainly intimates his 
intention of writing an epic on the story of Arthur. It may be 
doubted whether he would have succeeded on such a topic. His 
austere character would seem to have been better fitted to feel the 
impulses of religious enthusiasm than those of chivalry ; and Eng- 
land has no reason to regret that her most sublime poet was reserved 
for the age of Cromwell instead of the romantic reign of Elizabeth. 

"j" The best imitation of the "Divina Commedia' is probably the 
" Cantiba in morte di Ugo Basville," by the most eminent of the 
living Italian poets, Monti. His talent for vigorous delineation by a 
single coup de pinceau is eminently Dantesque, and the plan of his 
poem is the exact counterpart of that of the "Inferno." Instead of a 
mortal descending into the regions of the damned, one of their num- 
ber (the spirit of Basville, a Frenchman) is summoned back to the 
earth, to behold the crimes and miseries of his native country during 
the period of the Revolution. 






CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 387 

trarch, with less talent, had a more extensive influence 
over the taste of their nation. The garrulous graces 
of the former and the lyrical finish of the latter are 
still solicited in the lighter compositions of Italy. 
Lastly, the discoveries of ancient manuscripts at home, 
and the introduction of others from Constantinople, 
when that rich depository of Grecian science fell into 
the hands of the barbarian, gave a new direction to 
the intellectual enterprise of Italian scholars, and with- 
drew them almost wholly from the farther cultivation 
of their infant literature. 

Owing to these circumstances, the introduction of 
the chivalrous epopee was protracted to the close of 
the fifteenth century, when its first successful specimens 
were produced at the accomplished court of the Me- 
dici. The encouragement extended by this illustrious 
family to every branch of intellectual culture has been 
too often the subject of encomium to require from us 
any particular animadversion. Lorenzo, especially, by 
uniting in his own person the scholarship and talent 
which he so liberally rewarded in others, contributed 
more than all to the effectual promotion of an enlight- 
ened taste among his countrymen. Even his amuse- 
ments were subservient to it, and the national literature 
may be fairly said at this day to retain somewhat of 
the character communicated to it by his elegant recrea- 
tions. His delicious villas at Fiesole and Cajano are 
celebrated by the scholars who, in the silence of their 
shades, pursued with him the studies of his favorite 
philosophy and of poetry. Even the sensual pleasures 
of the banquet were relieved by the inventions of wit 
and fancy. Lyrical composition, which, notwithstand- 






388 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

ing its peculiar adaptation to the flexible movements 
of the Italian tongue, had fallen into neglect, was re- 
vived, and, together with the first eloquent produc- 
tions of the romantic muse, was recited at the table 
of Lorenzo. 

Of the guests who frequented it, Pulci and Politian 
are the names most distinguished, and the only ones 
connected with our present subject. The latter of 
these was received into the family of Lorenzo as the 
preceptor of his children, — an office for which he seems 
to have been better qualified by his extraordinary 
attainments than by his disposition. Whatever may 
have been the asperity of his temper, however, his 
poetical compositions breathe the perfect spirit of har- 
mony. The most remarkable of these, distinguished 
as the "Verses of Politian" (Stanze di Poliziand), is a 
brief fragment of an epic whose purpose was to cele- 
brate the achievements of Julian de' Medici, a younger 
brother of Lorenzo, at a tournament exhibited at Flor- 
ence in 1468. This would appear but a meagre basis 
for the structure of a great poem. Politian, however, 
probably in consequence of the untimely death of 
Julian, his hero, abandoned it in the middle of the 
second canto, even before he had reached the event 
which was to constitute the subject of his story. 

The incidents of the poem thus abruptly terminated 
are of no great account. We have a portrait of Julian, 
a hunting -expedition, a love -adventure, a digression 
into the island of Venus, which takes up about half the 
canto, and a vision of the hero, which ends just as the 
tournament, the subject of the piece, is about to begin, 
and with it, like the "fabric of a vision," ends the 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



389 



poem also. In this short space, however, the poet has 
concentrated all the beauties of his art, the melody of 
a musical ear, and the inventions of a plastic fancy. 
His island of love, in particular, is emblazoned with 
those gorgeous splendors which have since been bor- 
rowed for the enchanted gardens of Alcina, Armida, 
and Acrasia. 

But this little fragment is not recommended, at least 
to an English reader, so much by its Oriental pomp 
of imagery as by its more quiet and delicate pictures 
of external nature. Brilliancy of imagination is the 
birthright of the Italian poet, as much as a sober, 
contemplative vein is of the English. This is the 
characteristic of almost all their best and most popular 
poetry during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. 
The two great poets of the fourteenth approach much 
nearer to the English character. Dante shows not only 
deeper reflection than is common with his country- 
men, but in parts of his work, in the Purgatorio more 
especially, manifests a sincere relish for natural beauty, 
by his most accurate pictures of rural objects and 
scenery. Petrarch cherished the recollections of an 
unfortunate passion until, we may say, without any 
mystical perversion of language, it became a part of 
his intellectual existence.* This gave a tender and 

* Whatever may be thought of the speculations of the Abbe de 
Sade, no doubt can be entertained of the substantial existence of 
Laura, or of Petrarch's passion for her. Indeed, independently of 
the internal evidence afforded by his poetry, such direct notices of his 
mistress are scattered through his " Letters" and serious prose com- 
positions that it is singular there should ever have existed a skepticism 
on these points. Ugo Foscolo, the well-known author of " Jacopo 
Ortis," has lately published an octavo volume, entitled " Essays on 



3 9 o BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

melancholy expression to his poems, more particularly 
to those written after the death of Laura, quite as much 
English as Italian. Love furnishes the great theme and 
impulse to the Italian poet. It is not too much to say 
that all their principal versifiers have written under 
the inspiration of a real or pretended passion. It is to 
them what a less showy and less exclusive sensibility is 
to an Englishman. The latter acknowledges the influ- 
ence of many other affections and relations in life. 
The death of a friend is far more likely to excite his 
muse than the smiles or frowns of his mistress. The 
Italian seldom dwells on melancholy reminiscences, but 
writes under the impulse of a living and ardent passion. 

Petrarch." Among other particulars showing the unbounded influ- 
ence that Laura de Sade obtained over the mind of her poetical 
lover, he quotes the following memorandum, made by Petrarch two 
months after her decease, in his private manuscript copy of Virgil, 
now preserved in the Ambrosian Library at Milan : 

" It was in the early days of my youth, on the sixth of April, in 
the morning, and in the year 1327, that Laura, distinguished by her 
own virtues, and celebrated in my verses, first blessed my eyes, in the 
Church of Santa Clara, at Avignon ; and it was in the same city, on 
the sixth of the very same month of April, at the very same hour in 
the morning, in the year 1348, that this bright luminary was with- 
drawn from our sight, when I was at Verona, alas ! ignorant of my 
calamity. The remains of her chaste and beautiful body were de- 
posited in the Church of the Cordeliers on the evening of the same 
day. To preserve the afflicting remembrance, I have taken a bitter 
pleasure in recording it, particularly in this book, which is most fre- 
quently before my eyes, in order that nothing in this world may have 
any farther attraction for me ; that, this great attachment to life being 
dissolved, I may, by frequent reflection, and a proper estimation of 
our transitory existence, be admonished that it is high time for me to 
think of quitting this earthly Babylon, which I trust it will not be 
difficult for me, with a strong and manly courage, to accomplish." — 
Page 35. 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 39 1 

Petrarch did both ; but in the poetry which he com- 
posed after the death of his mistress, exalted as it is 
by devotional sentiment, he deviated from the customs 
of his nation, and adopted an English tone of feeling. 
A graver spirit of reflection and a deeper sympathy for 
the unobtrusive beauties of nature are observable in 
some of their later writers ; but these are not primi- 
tive elements in the Italian character. Gay, brilliant, 
imaginative, are the epithets which best indicate the 
character of their literature during its most flourishing 
periods; and the poetry of Italy seems to reflect as 
clearly her unclouded skies and glowing landscape as 
that of England does the tranquil and somewhat melan- 
choly complexion of her climate. 

The verses of Politian, to return from our digression, 
contain many descriptions distinguished by the calm, 
moral beauty of which we have been speaking. Re- 
semblances may be traced between these passages and 
the writings of some of our best English poets. The 
descriptive poetry of Gray and of Goldsmith, par- 
ticularly, exhibits a remarkable coincidence with that 
of Politian in the enumeration of rural images. The 
stanza cxxi., setting forth the descent of Cupid into 
the island of Venus, may be cited as having suggested a 
much-admired simile in Gay's popular ballad, "Black- 
eyed Susan," since the English verse is almost a meta- 
phrase of the Italian : 

" Or poi che ad ail tese ivi pervenne, 

Forte le scosse, e giu calossi a piombo, 
Tutto serrato nelle sacre penne, 

Come a suo nido fa lieto Colombo." 



392 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

" So the sweet lark, high poised in air, 
Shuts close his pinions to his breast, 
If chance his mate's shrill call he hear, 
And drops at once into her nest." 

These "Stanze" were the first example of a happy 
cultivation of Italian verse in the fifteenth century. 
The scholars of that day composed altogether in Latin. 
Politian, as he grew older, disdained this abortive 
production of his youthful muse, and relied for his 
character with posterity on his Latin poems and his 
elaborate commentaries upon the ancient classics. Pe- 
trarch looked for immortality to his "Africa," as did 
Boccaccio to his learned Latin disquisition upon an- 
cient mythology.* Could they now, after the lapse of 
more than four centuries, revisit the world, how would 
they be astonished, perhaps mortified, the former to 
find that he was remembered only as the sonnetteer, 
and the latter as the novelist ! The Latin prose of 
Politian may be consulted by an antiquary; his Latin 
poetry must be admired by scholars of taste; but his 
few Italian verses constitute the basis of his high repu- 
tation at this day with the great body of his country- 
men. He wrote several lyrical pieces, and a short 
pastoral drama {Orfeo), the first of a species which 
afterwards grew into such repute under the hands of 
Tasso and Guarini. All of these bear the same print 
of his genius. One cannot but regret that so rare a 

* " De Genealogia Deorum." — The Latin writings of Boccaccio and 
Petrarch may be considered the foundation of their fame with their 
contemporaries. The coronation of the latter in the Roman capitol 
was a homage paid rather to his achievements in an ancient tongue 
than to any in his own. He does not even notice his Italian lyrics in 
his " Letters to Posterity." 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 393 

mind should, in conformity with the perverse taste 
of his age, have abandoned the freshness of a living 
tongue for the ungrateful culture of a dead one. His 
"Stanze," the mere prologue of an epic, still survive 
amid the complete and elaborate productions of suc- 
ceeding poets ; they may be compared to the graceful 
portico of some unfinished temple, which time and 
taste have respected, and which remains as in the days 
of its architect, a beautiful ruin. 

Luigi Pulci, the other eminent poet whom we men- 
tioned as a frequent guest at the table of Lorenzo de' 
Medici, was of a noble family, and the youngest of 
three brothers, all of them even more distinguished by 
their accomplishments than by birth. There seems to 
be nothing worthy of particular record in his private 
history. He is said to have possessed a frank and 
merry disposition, and, to judge from his great poem, 
as well as from some lighter pieces of burlesque satire, 
which he bandied with one of his friends whom he 
was in the habit of meeting at the house of Lorenzo, 
he was not particularly fastidious in his humor. His 
Morgante Maggiore is reported to have been written at 
the request of Lorenzo's mother, and recited at his 
table. It is a genuine epic of chivalry, containing 
twenty-eight cantos, founded on the traditionary de- 
feat — the "dolorosa rotta" — of Charlemagne and his 
peers in the Valley of Roncesvalles. It adheres much 
more closely than any of the other Italian romances to 
the lying chronicle of Turpin. 

It may appear singular that the intention of the 
author should not become apparent in the course of 
eight-and-twenty cantos, but it is a fact that scholars 
r '■ 



394 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



both at home and abroad have long disputed whether 
the poem is serious or satirical. Crescimbeni styles 
the author "modesto e moderato," while Tiraboschi 
expressly charges him with the deliberate design of 
ridiculing Scripture, and Voltaire, in his preface, cites 
the Morgante as an apology for his profligate "Pu- 
celle." It cannot be denied that the story abounds 
in such ridiculous eccentricities as give it the air of a 
parody upon the marvels of romance. The hero, Mor- 
gante, is a converted infidel, " un gigante smisurato," 
whose formidable weapon is a bell-clapper, and who, 
after running through some twenty cantos of gigantic 
valor and mountebank extravagance, is brought to an 
untimely end by a wound in the heel, not from a 
Trojan arrow, but from the bite of a crab ! We 
doubt, however, whether Pulci intended his satirical 
shafts for the Christian faith. Liberal allowance is to 
be conceded for the fashion of his age. Nothing is 
more frequent in the productions of that period than 
such irreverent freedoms with the most sacred topics 
as would be quite shocking in ours. Such freedoms, 
however, cannot reasonably be imputed to profanity, 
or even levity, since numerous instances of them occur 
in works of professed moral tendency, as in the mys- 
teries and moralities, for example, those solemn de- 
formities of the ancient French and English drama. 
The chronicle of Turpin, the basis of Pulci's epic, 
which, though a fraud, was a pious one, invented by 
some priest to celebrate the triumphs of the Christian 
arms, is tainted with the same indecent familiarities.* 

* This spurious document of the twelfth century contains, in a copy 
which we have now before us, less than sixty pages. It has neither 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



395 



Tempora mutantur. In a scandalous pasquinade 
published by Lord Byron in the first number of his 
Liberal, there is a verse describing St. Peter officiating 
as the doorkeeper of heaven. Pulci has a similar one 
in the Morgan te (canto xxvi., st. 91), which, no doubt, 
furnished the hint to his lordship, who has often im- 
proved upon the Italian poets. Both authors describe 
St. Peter's dress and vocation with the most whimsical 
minuteness. In the Italian, the passage, introduced 
into the midst of a solemn, elaborate description, has 
all the appearance of being told in very good faith. 
No one will venture to put so charitable a construction 
upon his lordship's motives. 

Whatever may have been the intention of Pulci in 
the preceding portion of the work, its concluding 
cantos are animated by the genuine spirit of Christian 
heroism. The rear of Charlemagne's army is drawn 
into an ambuscade by the treachery of his confidant 
Ganelon. Roncesvalles, a valley in the heart of the 
Pyrenees, is the theatre of action, and Orlando, with 
the flower of French chivalry, perishes there, over- 
powered by the Saracens. The battle is told in a 
sublime epic tone worthy of the occasion. The cantos 
xxvi., xxvii., containing it, are filled with a continued 
strain of high religious enthusiasm, with the varying, 
animating bustle of a mortal conflict, with the most 

the truth of history nor the beauty of fiction. It abounds in com- 
monplace prodigies, and sets forth Charlemagne's wars and his defeat 
in the valley of Roncesvalles, an event which probably never hap- 
pened. Insignificant as it is in every other respect, however, it is the 
seed from which have sprung up those romantic fictions which adorned 
the rude age of the Normans, and which flourished in such wide lux- 
uriance under Italian culture. 



396 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

solemn and natural sentiment suggested by the horror 
of the situation. Orlando's character rises into that 
of the divine warrior. His speech at the opening of 
the action, his lament over his unfortunate army, his 
melancholy reflections on the battle-field the night 
after the engagement, are conceived with such sub- 
limity and pathos as attest both the poetical talent of 
Pulci and the grandeur and capacity of his subject. 
Yet the Morgante, the greater part of which is so 
ludicrous, is the only eminent Italian epic which has 
seriously described the celebrated rout at Roncesvalles. 
Pulci' s poem is not much read by the Italians. Its 
style, in general, is too unpolished for the fastidious 
delicacy of a modern ear, but, as it abounds in the 
old-fashioned proverbial isms (riboboli) of Florence, it 
is greatly prized by the Tuscan purists. These familiar 
sayings, the elegant slang of the Florentine mob, have 
a value among the Italian scholars, at least among a 
large fraction of them, much like that of old coins 
with a virtuoso : the more rare and rusty, the better. 
They give a high relish to many of their ancient 
writers, who, without other merit than their antiquity, 
are cited as authorities in their vocabulary.* These 
riboboli are to be met with most abundantly in their 
old novelle, those especially which are made up of 
familiar dialogue between the lower classes of citizens. 
Boccaccio has very many such ; Sacchetti has more 
than all his prolific tribe, and it is impossible for a 

* This has been loudly censured by many of their scholars opposed 
to the literary supremacy of the Della-Cruscan Academy. See, in 
particular, the acute treatise of Cesarotti, " Saggio sulla Filosofia delle 
Lingue," Parte IV. 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



397 



foreigner to discern or to appreciate the merits of such 
a writer. The lower classes in Florence retain to this 
day much of their antique picturesque phraseology,* 
and Alfieri tells us that " it was his great delight to 
stand in some unnoticed corner and listen to the 
conversation of the mob in the market-place." 

With the exception of Orlando, Pulci has shown no 
great skill in delineation of character. Charlemagne 
and Ganelon are the prominent personages. The lat- 
ter is a parody on traitors ; he is a traitor to common 
sense. Charlemagne is a superannuated dupe, with 
just credulity sufficient to dovetail into all the cunning 
contrivances of Gan. The women have neither refine- 
ment nor virtue. The knights have none of the softer 
graces of chivalry ; they bully and swagger like the 
rude heroes of Homer, and are exclusively occupied 
with the merciless extermination of infidels. We meet 
with none of the imagery, the rich sylvan scenery, so 
lavishly diffused through the epics of Ariosto and 
Boiardo. The machinery bears none of the airy 
touches of an Arabian pencil, but is made out of 
the cold excrescences of Northern superstition, dwarfs, 
giants, and necromancers. Before quitting Pulci, we 
must point out a passage (canto xxv., st. 229, 230) in 
which a devil announces to Rinaldo the existence of 
another continent, beyond the ocean, inhabited by 
mortals like himself. The theory of gravitation is 

* " The pure language of Boccaccio, and of other ancient writers, 
is preserved at this day much more among the lower classes of Flor- 
entine mechanics and of the neighboring peasants than among the 
more polished Tuscan society, whose original dialect has suffered 
great mutations in their intercourse with foreigners." Pignotti, 
Storia della Toscana, torn. ii. p. 167. 



398 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

also plainly intimated. As the poem was written 
before the voyages of Columbus and before the phys- 
ical discoveries of Galileo and Copernicus, the predic- 
tions are extremely curious.* The fiend, alluding to 
the vulgar superstitions entertained of the Pillars of 
Hercules, thus addresses his companion : 

" Know that this theory is false : his bark 
The daring mariner shall urge far o'er 
The western wave, a smooth and level plain, 
Albeit the earth is fashioned like a wheel. 
Man was in ancient days of grosser mould, 
And Hercules might blush to learn how far 
Beyond the limits he had vainly set, 
The dullest sea-boat soon shall wing her way. 
Men shall descry another hemisphere, 
Since to one common centre all things tend ; 
So earth, by curious mystery divine 
Well balanced, hangs amid the starry spheres. 
At our antipodes are cities, states, 
And thronged empires, ne'er divined of yore. 
But see, the sun speeds on his western path 
To glad the nations with expected light." 

The dialogues of Pulci's devils respecting free will and 
necessity, their former glorious and their present fallen 
condition, have suggested many hints for our greater 
Milton to improve upon. The juggling frolics of these 
fiends at the royal banquet in Saragossa may have been 
the original of the comical marvels played off through 
the intervention of similar agents by Dr. Faust. 

* Dante, two centuries before, had also expressed the same belief 
in an undiscovered quarter of the globe : 

" De' vostri sensi, ch'e del rimanente, 
Non vogliate negar l'esperienza, 
Diretro al sol, del mondo senza gente." 

Inferno, canto xxvl. v. 115. 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



399 



Notwithstanding the good faith and poetical eleva- 
tion of its concluding cantos, the Morgante, according 
to our apprehension, is any thing but a serious romance. 
Not that it shows a disposition to satire, above all, to 
the religious satire often imputed to it ; but there is a 
light banter, a vein of fun, running through the greater 
portion of it, which is quite the opposite of the lofty 
spirit of chivalry. Romantic fiction, among our Nor- 
man ancestors, grew so directly out of the feudal re- 
lations and adventurous spirit of the age that it was 
treated with all the gravity of historical record. When 
reproduced in the polite and artificial societies of Italy, 
the same fictions wore an air of ludicrous extravagance 
which would no longer admit of their being repeated 
seriously. Recommended, however, by a proper sea- 
soning of irony, they might still amuse as ingenious 
tales of wonder. This may be kept in view in follow- 
ing out the ramifications of Italian narrative poetry ; 
for they will all be found, in a greater or less degree, 
tinctured with the same spirit of ridicule.* The circle 

* A distinction may be pointed out between the Norman and the 
Italian epics of chivalry. The former, composed in the rude ages of 
feudal heroism, are entitled to much credit as pictures of the manners 
of that period ; while the latter, written in an age of refinement, have 
been carried by their poets into such beautiful extravagances of fiction 
as are perfectly incompatible with a state of society at any period. 
Let any one compare the feats of romantic valor recorded by Frois- 
sart, the turbulent, predatory habits of the barons and ecclesiastics 
under the early Norman dynasty, as reported by Turner in his late 
" History of England," with these old romances, and he will find 
enough to justify our remark. Ste.-Palaye, after a diligent study of 
the ancient epics, speaks of them as exhibiting a picture of society 
closely resembling that set forth in the chronicles of the period. 
Turner, after as diligent an examination of early historical docu- 



400 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



for whom Pulci composed his epic was peculiarly dis- 
tinguished by that fondness for good-humored raillery 
which may be considered a national trait with his 
countrymen. 

It seems to have been the delight of Lorenzo de' 
Medici, as it was afterwards, in a more remarkable 
degree, of his son Leo Tenth, to abandon himself to 
the most unreserved social freedoms with the friends 
whom he collected around his table. The satirical 
epigrams which passed there in perfect good humor 
between his guests show, at least, full as much merri- 
ment as manners. Machiavelli concludes his history 
of Florence with an elaborate portrait of Lorenzo, in 
which he says that "he took greater delight in frivo- 
lous pleasures, and in the society of jesters and satirists, 
than became so great a man." The historian might 
have been less austere in his commentary upon Lo- 
renzo's taste, since he was not particularly fastidious 
in the selection of his own amusements.* 

ments, pronounces that the facts contained in them perfectly accord 
with the general portraiture of manners depicted in the romances. 
Mem. de l'Acad. des Inscriptions, torn, xx., art. sur l'Ancien Che- 
valerie. — Turner's History of England from the Norman Conquest, 
etc., vol. i. ch. vi. 

* A letter written by Machiavelli, long unknown, and printed for 
the first time at Milan, 1810, gives a curious picture of his daily occu- 
pations when living in retirement on his little patrimony at a distance 
from Florence. Among other particulars, he mentions that it was his 
custom after dinner to repair to the tavern, where he passed his after- 
noon at cards with the company whom he ordinarily found there, 
consisting of the host, a miller, a butcher, and a lime-maker. Another 
part of the epistle exhibits a more pleasing view of the pursuits of the 
ex-secretary: " In the evening I return to my house and retire to my 
study. I then take off the rustic garments which I had worn during 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



401 



At the close of the fifteenth century Italy was divided 
into a number of small but independent states, whose 
petty sovereigns vied with each other not merely in the 
poor parade of royal pageantry, but in the liberal en- 
dowment of scientific institutions and the patronage of 
learned men. Almost every Italian scholar was attached 
to some one or other of these courtly circles, and a 
generous, enlightened emulation sprang up among the 
states of Italy, such as had never before existed in any 
other age or country. Among the republics of ancient 
Greece the rivalship was political. Their literature, 
from the time of Solon, was almost exclusively Athe- 
nian. An interesting picture of the cultivated manners 
and intellectual pleasures of these little courts may be 
gathered from the Cortigiano of Castiglione, which con- 
tains in the introduction a particular account of the 
pursuits and pastimes of the court of his sovereign, 
the Duke of Urbino. 

None of these Italian states make so shining a figure 
in literary history as the insignificant duchy of Ferrara. 
The foul crimes which defile the domestic annals of the 
family of Este have been forgotten in the munificent 
patronage extended by them to letters. The librarians 
of the Biblioteca Estense, Muratori and Tiraboschi, 
have celebrated the virtues of their native princes with 
the encomiastic pen of loyalty ; while Ariosto and 

the day, and, having dressed myself in the apparel which I used to 
wear at court and in town, I mingle in the society of the great men 
of antiquity. I draw from them the nourishment which alone is 
suited to me, and during the four hours passed in this intercourse I 
forget all my misfortunes, and fear neither poverty nor death. In this 
manner I have composed a little work upon government." This little 
work was " The Prince." 

34* 



4-02 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



Tasso, whose misfortunes furnish but an indifferent 
commentary upon these eulogiums, offering to them 
the grateful incense of poetic adulation, have extended 
their names still wider by inscribing them upon their 
immortal epics. Their patronage had the good for- 
tune, not always attending patronage, of developing 
genius. Those models of the pastoral drama, the 
Aminta of Tasso, and the Pastor Fido of Guarini, 
whose luxury of expression, notwithstanding the dic- 
tum of Dr. Johnson,* it has been found as difficult to 
imitate in their own tongue as it is impossible to 
translate into any other ; the comedies and Horatian 
satires of Ariosto ; the Secchia Rapita o? Tassoni, the 
acknowledged model of the mock-heroic poems of 
Pope and Boileau ; and, finally, the three great epics 
of Italy, the Orlando Innamorato, the Furioso, and the 
Gerusalemme Libe?-ata, were all produced, in the brief 
compass of a century, within the limited dominions of 
the House of Este. Dante had reproached Ferrara, in 
the thirteenth century, with never having been illus- 
trated by the name of a poet. 

Boiardo, Count of Scandiano, the author of the 
Orlando Innamorato, the first-born of these epics, was 
a subject of Hercules First, Duke of Ferrara, and by 
him appointed governor of Reggio. His military 
conduct in that office, and his learned translations 
from the ancient classics, show him to have been 
equally accomplished as a soldier and as a scholar. 
In the intervals of war, to which his active life was 

* " Dione is a counterpart to Aminta and Pastor Fido, and other 
trifles of the same kind, easily imitated, and unworthy of imitation." 
Life of Gav. 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 403 

devoted, he amused himself with the composition of 
his long poem. He had spun this out into the sixty- 
seventh canto, without showing any disposition to bring 
it to a conclusion, when his literary labors were sud- 
denly interrupted, as he informs us in his parting 
stanza, by the invasion of the French into Italy in 
1494; and in the same year the author died. The 
Orlando Innamorato, as it advanced, had been read 
by its author to his friends ; but no portion of it was 
printed till after his death, and its extraordinary merits 
were not then widely estimated, in consequence of its 
antiquated phraseology and Lombard provincialisms. 
A rifacwiento some time after appeared, by one Do- 
menichi, who spoiled many of the beauties, without 
improving the style, of his original. Finally, Berni, 
in little more than thirty years after the death of 
Boiardo, new-moulded the whole poem,* with so much 
dexterity as to retain the substance of every verse in 
the original and yet to clothe them in the seductive 
graces of his own classical idiom. Berni's version is 
the only one now read in Italy, and the original poem 
of Boiardo is so rare in that country that it was found 
impossible to procure for the library of Harvard Uni- 
versity any copy of the Innamorato more ancient than 
the reformed one by Domenichi. 

The history of letters affords no stronger example of 

* Sismondi is mistaken in saying that Berni remodelled the Innamo- 
rato sixty years after the original. He survived Boiardo only forty- 
two years, and he had half completed his rifaci?nento at least ten 
years before his own death, as is evident from his beautiful invocation 
to Verona and the Po (canto xxx.), on whose banks he was then 
writing it, and where he was living, 1526, in the capacity of secretary 
to the Bishop of Verona. 



404 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

the power of style than the different fate of these two 
productions of Berni and Boiardo. We doubt whether 
the experiment would have been attended with the 
same result among a people by whom the nicer beauties 
of expression are less cultivated, as with the English, 
for example. If we may judge from the few speci- 
mens which we have seen extracted from the Italian 
original, Chaucer exhibits a more obsolete and exotic 
phraseology than Boiardo. Yet the partial attempt of 
Dryden to invest the father of English poetry with a 
modernized costume has had little success, and the 
little epic of "Palamon and Arcite (The Knight's 
Tale)" is much more highly relished in the rude but 
muscular diction of Chaucer than in the polished ver- 
sion of his imitator. 

Whatever may be the estimation of the style, the 
glory of the original delineation of character and inci- 
dent is to be given exclusively to Boiardo. He was the 
first of the epic poets who founded a romance upon 
the love of Orlando ; and a large portion of the poem 
is taken up with the adventures of this hero and his 
doughty paladins, assembled in a remote province of 
China for the defence of his mistress, the beautiful 
Angelica: 

" When Agrican, with all his northern powers, 
Besieged Albracca, as romances tell, 
The city of Gallaphrone, from thence to win 
The fairest of her sex, Angelica 
His daughter, sought by many prowess knights, 
Both Paynim, and the peers of Charlemagne." 

Paradise Regained. 

With the exception of the midnight combat between 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 405 

Agrican and Orlando, in which the conversion of the 
dying Tartar reminds one of the similar but more af- 
fecting death of Clorinda in the " Jerusalem Deliv- 
ered/' there is very little moral interest attached to 
these combats of Boiardo, which are mere gladiatorial 
exhibitions of hard fighting, and sharp, jealous wran- 
gling. The fairy gardens of Falerina and Morgana, 
upon which the poet enters in the second book, are 
much better adapted to the display of his wild and 
exuberant imagination. No Italian writer, not even 
Ariosto, is comparable to Boiardo for exhibitions of 
fancy. Enchantment follows enchantment, and the 
reader, bewildered with the number and rapidity of the 
transitions, looks in vain for some clue, even the slen- 
der thread of allegory which is held out by the poet, 
to guide him through the unmeaning marvellous of 
Arabian fiction. Ariosto has tempered his imagination 
with more discretion. Both of these great romantic 
poets have wrought upon the same characters, and 
afford, in this respect, a means of accurate comparison. 
Without going into details, we may observe, in general, 
that Boiardo has more strength than grace; Ariosto, 
the reverse. Boiardo's portraits are painted, or may 
be rather said to be sculptured, with a clear, coarse 
hand, out of some rude material. Ariosto' s are sketched 
with the volatile graces, nice shades, and variable 
drapery of the most delicate Italian pencil. In female 
portraiture, of course, Ariosto is far superior to his 
predecessor. The glaring coquetry of Boiardo's An- 
gelica is refined by the hand of his rival into some- 
thing like the coquetry of high life, and the ferocious 
tigress beauties of the original Marfisa are softened 



406 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

into those of a more polished and courtly amazon. 
The Innamorato contains no examples of the pure, 
deep feeling which gives a soul to the females of the 
Furioso, and we look in vain for the frolic and airy- 
scenes which enchant us so frequently in the latter 
poem.* We may remark, in conclusion, that the rapid 
and unintermitting succession of incidents in the In- 
namorato prevents the poet from indulging in those 
collateral beauties of sentiment and imagery which are 
prodigally diffused over the romance of Ariosto, and 
which give to it an exquisite finish. 

Berni's rifacimento of the Orlando Innamorato, as 
we have already observed, first made it popular with 
the Italians, by a magical varnish of versification, 
which gave greater lustre to the beauties of his origi- 
nal and glossed over its defects. It has, however, the 
higher merit of exhibiting a great variety of original 
reflections, sometimes in the form of digressions, but 
more frequently as introductions to the cantos. These 
are enlivened by the shrewd wit and elaborate artless- 
ness of expression that form the peculiar attraction of 
Berni's poetry. In one of the prefatory stanzas to the 
fifty-first canto the reader may recognize a curious 
coincidence with a well-known passage in Shakspeare, 
— the more so as Berni, we believe, was never turned 
into English before the present partial attempt of Mr. 
Rose : 

" Who steals a bugle-horn, a ring, a steed, 

Or such-like worthless thing, has some discretion ; 

* The chase of the Fairy Morgana, and the malicious dance of the 
Loves around Rinaldo (1. ii., c. viii., xv.), may, however, be considered 
good exceptions to this remark. 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 407 

'Tis petty larceny ; not such his deed 
Who robs us of our fame, our best possession. 

And he who takes our labor's worthiest meed 
May well be deem'd a felon by profession, 

Who so much more our hate and scourge deserves 

As from the rule of right he wider swerves." 

In another of these episodes the poet has introduced 
a portrait of himself. The whole passage is too long 
for insertion here ; but, as Mr. Rose has also translated 
it, we will borrow a few stanzas from his skilful version : 

" His mood was choleric, and his tongue was vicious. 

But he was praised for singleness of heart ; 
Not tax'd as avaricious or ambitious, 

Affectionate and frank, and void of art ; 
A lover of his friends, and unsuspicious, 

But where he hated knew no middle part ; 
And men his malice by his love might rate : 
But then he was more prone to love than hate. 

" To paint his person, this was thin and dry; 

Well sorting it, his legs were spare and lean ; 
Broad was his visage, and his nose was high, 

While narrow was the space that was between 
His eyebrows sharp ; and blue his hollow eye, 

Which for his bushy beard had not been seen, 
But that the master kept this thicket clear'd, 
At mortal war with mustache and with beard. 

" No one did ever servitude detest 

Like him, though servitude was still his dole ; 

Since fortune or the devil did their best 
To keep him evermore beneath control. 

While, whatsoever was his patron's hest, 
To execute it went against his soul ; 

His service would he freely yield unask'd, 

But lost all heart and hope if he were task'd. 



4o8 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

'' Nor music, hunting-match, nor mirthful measure, 
Nor play, nor other pastime, moved him aught ; 
And if 'twas true that horses gave him pleasure, 

The simple sight of them was all he sought, 
Too poor to purchase ; and his only treasure 
His naked bed ; his pastime to do naught 
But tumble there, and stretch his weary length, 
And so recruit his spirits and his strength." 

Rose's Innamorato, p. 48. 

The passage goes on to represent the dreamy and 
luxurious pleasures of this indolent pastime, with such 
an epicurean minuteness of detail as puts the sincerity 
of the poet beyond a doubt. His smaller pieces — 
Capitoli, as they are termed — contain many incidental 
allusions which betray the same lazy propensity. 

The early part of Berni's life was passed in Rome, 
where he obtained a situation under the ecclesiastical 
government. He was afterwards established in a can- 
onry at Florence, where he led an easy, effeminate life, 
much caressed for his social talents by the Duke Ales- 
sandro de' Medici. His end was more tragical than 
was to have been anticipated from so quiet and un- 
ambitious a temper. He is said to have been secretly 
assassinated, 1536, by the order of Alexander, for re- 
fusing to administer poison to the duke's enemy, the 
Cardinal Hyppolito de' Medici. The story is told in 
many contradictory ways by different Italian writers, 
some of whom disbelieve it altogether. The imputa- 
tion, however, is an evidence of the profligate charac- 
ter of that court, and, if true, is only one out of many 
examples of perfidious assassination, which in that age 
dishonored some of the most polished societies in 
Italy. 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 409 

Berni has had the distinction of conferring his name 
on a peculiar species of Italian composition.* The 
epithet " Bemesco" is not derived, however, as has 
been incorrectly stated by some foreign scholars, \ from 
his reformed version of the "Orlando," but from his 
smaller pieces, his Capitoli more especially. It is diffi- 
cult to convey a correct and adequate notion of this 
kind of satirical trifling, since its chief excellence re- 
sults from idiomatic felicities of expression that refuse 
to be transplanted into a foreign tongue, and there is 
no imitation of it, that we recollect, in our own lan- 
guage. It is a misapplication of the term Bernesque 
to apply it, as has been sometimes done, to the ironical 
style supposed to have been introduced by Lord Byron 
in his Beppo and Don Juan. The clear, unequivocal 
vein of irony which plays through the sportive sallies 
of the Italian has no resemblance to the subdued but 
caustic sneer of the Englishman ; nor does it, in our 
opinion, resemble in the least Peter Pindar's burlesque 
satire, to which an excellent critic in Italian poetry 
has compared it.| Pindar is much too unrefined in 
versification and in diction to justify the parallel. 
Italian poetry always preserves the purity of its ex- 
pression, however coarse or indecent may be the topic 
on which it is employed. The subjects of many of 
these poems are of the most whimsical and trivial 

*~ He cannot be properly considered its inventor, however. He 
lived in time to give the last polish to a species of familiar poetry 
which had been long undergoing the process of refinement from the 
hands of his countrymen. 

| Vide Annotazioni alia Vita di Berni, dal conte Mazzuchelli, Clas. 
Hal., p. xxxiv. 

\ Roscoe's Life of Lorenzo de' Medici, vol. i. p. 392, note. 

s 35 



41 o BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

nature. We find some in Lode delta Peste, del Debito, 
etc. ; several in commendation of the delicacies of the 
table, of "jellies," "eels," or any other dainty which 
pleased his epicurean palate. These Cafiitoli, like most 
of the compositions of this polished versifier, furnish a 
perfect example of the triumph of style. The senti- 
ments, sometimes indelicate, and often puerile, may be 
considered, like the worthless insects occasionally found 
in amber, indebted for their preservation to the beauti- 
ful substance in which they are imbedded. 

It is a curious fact that, notwithstanding the appar- 
ent facility and fluent graces of Berni's style, it was 
wrought with infinite care. Some of his verses have 
been corrected twenty and thirty times. Many of his 
countrymen have imitated it, mistaking its familiarity 
of manner for facility of execution. 

This fastidious revision has been common with the 
most eminent Italian poets. Petrarch devoted months 
to the perfecting of one of his exquisite sonnets.* 
Ariosto, as his son Virginius records of him, "was 
never satisfied with his verses, but was continually cor- 

* The following is a literal translation of a succession of memoran- 
dums in Latin at the head of one of his sonnets: " I began this by 
the impulse of the Lord [Domino jubente), tenth September, at the 
dawn of day, after my morning prayers." 

" I must make these two verses over again, singing them, and I 
must transpose them. Three o'clock A.M., 19th October." 

" I like this {Hoc placet). 30th October." 

" No, this does not please me. 20th December, in the evening." 

" February 18th, towards noon. This is now well: however, look 
at it again." 

It was generally on Friday that he occupied himself with the pain- 
ful labor of correction, and this was also set apart by him as a day of 
fast and penitence. Essays, cit. sup. 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 4 n 

recting and recorrecting them;" almost every stanza 
in the last edition of his poem published in his lifetime 
is altered from the original, and one verse is pointed 
out (canto xviii., st. 142) whose variations filled many 
pages. Tasso's manuscripts, preserved in the library 
at Modena, have been so often retouched by him that 
they are hardly intelligible ; and Alfieri was in the habit 
not only of correcting verses, but of remoulding whole 
tragedies, several of which, he tells us in his Memoirs, 
were thus transcribed by him no less than three times. 
It is remarkable that, in a country where the imagina- 
tion has been most active, the labor of the file should 
have been most diligently exerted on poetical composi- 
tions. Such examples of the pains taken by men of 
real genius might furnish a wholesome hint to some of 
the rapid, dashing writers of our own day. "Avec 
quelque talent qu'on puisse etre ne," says Rousseau, in 
his Confessions, "Tart d'ecrire ne se prend pas tout 
d'un coup." 

We have violated the chronological series of the 
Italian epopee, in our notice of Berni, in order to con- 
nect his poem with the model on which it was cast. 
We will quit him with the remark that for his fame he 
seems to have been as much indebted to good fortune 
as to desert. His countrymen have affixed his name to 
an illustrious poem of which he was not the author, 
and to a popular species of composition of which he 
was not the inventor. 

In little more than twenty years after the death of 
Boiardo, Ariosto gave to the world his first edition 
of the Oi'lando Furioso. The celebrity of the Inna- 
morato made Ariosto prefer building upon this sure 



412 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



foundation to casting a new one of his own, and, as 
his predecessor had fortunately left all the dramatis 
persons of his unfinished epic alive upon the stage, he 
had only to continue their histories to the end of the 
drama. "As the former of these two poems has no 
termination, and the latter no regular beginning, they 
may both be considered as forming one complete 
epic. ' ' * The latter half was, however, destined not 
only to supply the deficiencies but to eclipse the glories 
of the former. 

Louis Ariosto was born of a respectable family at 
Reggio, 1474. After serving a reluctant apprentice- 
ship of five years in the profession of the law, his father 
allowed him to pursue other studies better adapted to 
his taste and poetical genius. The elegance of his 
lyrical compositions in Latin and Italian recommended 
him to the patronage of the Cardinal Hyppolito 
d'Este, and of his brother Alphonso, who in 1505 
succeeded to the ducal throne of Ferrara. Ariosto' s 
abilities were found, however, not to be confined to 
poetry, and, among other offices of trust, he was em- 
ployed by the duke in two important diplomatic nego- 
tiations with the court of Rome. But the Muses still 
obtained his principal homage, and all his secret leisure 
was applied to the perfecting of the great poem which 
was to commemorate at once his own gratitude and 
the glories of the house of Este. After fourteen years' 
assiduous labor, he presented to the Cardinal Hyppo- 
lito the first copy of his Orlando Furioso. The well- 
known reply of the prelate, " Messer Lodovico, dove ??iai 
avete trovate taiitc faiifaluche /" (" Master Louis, where 

* Tasso, Discorsi Poetici, p. 29. 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



413 



have you picked up so many trifles?") will be remem- 
bered in Italy as long as the poem itself.* 

Ariosto, speaking of his early study of jurisprudence 
in one of his Satires, f says that he passed five years in 
quelle ciancie, — a word which signifies much the same 
with the epithet fanfaluche or coglione7'ie, whichever it 
might have been, imputed to the cardinal. Ariosto 
was a poet ; the cardinal was a mathematician ; and 
each had the very common failing of undervaluing a 
profession different from his own. The courtly libra- 
rian of the Biblioteca Estense endeavors to explain 
away this and the subsequent conduct of Ariosto's pa- 
tron ; \ but the poet's Satires, in which he alludes to 
the behavior of the cardinal with the fine raillery, and 
to his own situation with the philosophic independ- 
ence, of Horace, furnish, abundant evidence of the 
cold, ungenerous deportment of Hyppolito.§ 

* An interrogation which might remind an Englishman of that put 
by the great Duke of Cumberland to Gibbon: "What, Mr. Gibbon, 
scribble, scribble, scribble still?" 

t A M. Pietro Bembo Cardinale. 

i Storia della Letteratura Italiana, torn. vii. pt. i. pp. 42, 43. 

$ In a satire addressed to Alessandro Ariosto, he speaks openly of 
the unprofitableness of his poetic labors : 

" Thanks to the Muses who reward 
So well the service of their bard, 
He almost may be said to lack 
A decent coat to clothe his back." 

And soon after, in the same epistle, he adverts with undisguised 
indignation to the oppressive patronage of Hyppolito : 

" If the poor stipend I receive 
Has led his highness to believe 
He has a right to task my toil 
Like any serf's upon his soil, 

*"» C % 



414 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

Notwithstanding the alienation of the cardinal, the 
poet still continued in favor with Alphonso. The pa- 
tronage bestowed upon him, however, seems to have 
been of a very selfish and sordid complexion. He was 
employed by the duke in offices most vexatious to one 
of his studious disposition, and he passed three years 
in reducing to tranquillity a barbarous, rebellious prov- 
ince of the duchy. His adventure there with a troop 
of banditti, who abandoned a meditated attack upon 
him when they learned that he was the author of the 
Orlando Furioso, is a curious instance of homage to 
literary talent, which may serve as a pendatit to the 
similar anecdote recorded of Tasso.* 

The latter portion of his life was passed on his 
own estate in comparative retirement. He refused all 
public employment, and, with the exception of his 
satires, and a few comedies which he prepared for the 

T' enthrall me with a servile chain 
That grinds my soul, his hopes are vain. 
Sooner than be such household slave, 
The sternest poverty I'll brave, 
And, from his pride and presents free, 
Resume my long-lost liberty." 

* Ginguene, whose facts are never to be suspected, whatever credit 
may be attached to his opinions, has related both these adventures 
without any qualification (Histoire litteraire d'ltalie, torn. iv. p. 359, 
torn. v. p. 291). This learned Frenchman professes to have compiled 
his history under the desire of vindicating Italian literature from the 
disparaging opinions entertained of it among his countrymen. This 
has led him to swell the trumpet of panegyric somewhat too stoutly, 
— indeed, much above the modest tone of the Italian savant who, 
upon his premature death, was appointed to continue the work. 
Ginguene died before he had completed the materials for his ninth 
volume, and the hiatus supplied by Professor Sain carries down the 
literary narrative only to the conclusion of the sixteenth century. 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



415 



theatre committed to his superintendence by Alphonso, 
he produced no new work. His hours were diligently 
occupied with the emendation and extension of his 
great poem; and in 1532, soon after the republica- 
tion of it in forty-six cantos, as it now stands, he died 
of a disease induced by severe and sedentary applica- 
tion. 

Ariosto is represented to have possessed a cheerful 
disposition, temperate habits, and their usual concomi- 
tant, a good constitution. Barotti has quoted, in his 
memoirs of the poet, some particulars respecting him, 
found among the papers of Virginius, his natural son. 
He is there said not to have been a great reader ; 
Horace and Catullus were the authors in whom he took 
most delight. His intense meditation upon the subject 
of his compositions frequently betrayed him into fits 
of abstraction, one of which is recorded. Intending, 
on a fine morning, to take his usual walk, he set out 
from Carpi, where he resided, and reached Ferrara late 
in the afternoon, in his slippers and robe de chai?ibre, 
uninterrupted by any one. His patrimony, though 
small, was equal to his necessities. An inscription 
which he placed over his door is indicative of that 
moderation and love of independence which distin- 
guished his character : 

" Parva, sed apta mihi, sed nulli obnoxia, sed non 
Sordida, parta meo sed tamen asre domus." 

It does not appear probable that he was ever married. 
He frequently alludes in his poems to some object of 
his affections, but without naming her. His bronze 
inkstand, still preserved in the library at Ferrara, is 



4 i 6 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

surmounted by a rilievo of a Cupid with his finger 
upon his lip, emblematic of a discreet silence not 
very common in these matters with his countrymen. 
He is said to have intended his mistress by the beauti- 
ful portrait of Ginevra (cantos iv., v.), as Tasso after- 
wards shadowed out Leonora in the affecting episode 
of Sophronia. This was giving them, according to 
Ariosto's own allusion, a glorious niche in the temple 
of immortality.* 

There still existed a general affectation among the 
Italian scholars of writing in the Latin language, when 
Ariosto determined to compose an epic poem. The 
most accomplished proficients in that ancient tongue 
flourished about this period, and Politian, Pontano, 
Vida, Sannazarius, Sadolet, Bembo, had revived, both 
in prose and poetry, the purity, precision, and classic 
elegance of the Augustan age. Politian and Lorenzo 
de' Medici were the only writers of the preceding cen- 
tury who had displayed the fecundity and poetical 
graces of their vernacular tongue, and their productions 
had been too few and of too trifling a nature to estab- 
lish a permanent precedent. Bembo, who wrote his 
elaborate history first in Latin, and who carried the 
complicated inversions, in fact, the idiom, of that lan- 
guage into his Italian compositions, would have per- 
suaded Ariosto to write his poem in the same tongue ; 
but he wisely replied that "he would rather be first 
among Tuscan writers than second among the Latin," 
and, following the impulse of his own more discrimi- 
nating taste, he gave, in the Orlando Furioso, such an 
exhibition of the fine tones and flexible movements of 

* Orlando Furioso, canto xxxv., st. 15, 16. 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



417 



his native language as settled the question of its pre- 
cedence forever with his countrymen. 

Ariosto at first intended to adopt the terza rima of 
Dante; indeed, the introductory verses of his poem in 
this measure are still preserved. He soon abandoned 
it, however, for the ottava rima, which is much better 
adapted to the light, rambling, picturesque narrative of 
the romantic epic* Every stanza furnishes a little pic- 
ture in itself, and the perpetual recurrence of the same 
rhyme produces not only a most agreeable melody to 
the ear, but is very favorable to a full and more power- 
ful development of the poet's sentiments. Instances 
of the truth of this remark must be familiar to every 
reader of Ariosto. It has been applied by Warton, 
with equal justice, to Spenser, whom the similar repeti- 
tion of identical cadences often leads to a copious and 
beautiful expansion of imagery. f Spenser's stanza dif- 

* The Italians, since the failure of Trissino, have very generally- 
adopted this measure for their epic poetry, while the terza rima is 
used for didactic and satirical composition. The graver subjects 
which have engaged the attention of some of their poets during the 
last century have made blank verse {verso sciolto) more fashionable 
among them. Cesarotti's Ossian, one of the earliest, may be cited 
as one of the most successful examples of it. No nation is so skilful 
in a nice adaptation of style to the subject, and iinitative harmony 
has been carried by them to a perfection which it can never hope to 
attain in any other living language ; for what other language is made 
so directly out of the elements of music? 

•j- The following stanza from the " Faerie Queene," describing the 
habitation of Morpheus " drowned deep in drowsie fit," may serve as 
an exemplification of our meaning : 

"And more to lull him in his slumber soft, 

A trickling streame from high rock tumbling downe, 
And ever drizling raine upon the loft, 

Mixt with a murmuring winde much like the sowne 



4 i8 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

fers materially from the Italian ottava rima, in having 
one more rhyme, and in the elongated Alexandrine 
with which it is concluded. This gave to his verses 
"the long, majestic march," well suited to the sober 
sublimity of his genius; but the additional rhyme 
much increased its metrical difficulties, already, from 
the comparative infrequency of assonances in our lan- 
guage, far superior to those of the Italian. This has 
few compound sounds, but, rolling wholly upon the 
five open vowels, a, e, i, o, u, affords a prodigious 
number of corresponding terminations. Hence their 
facility of improvisation. Voltaire observes that in the 
Jerusalem Delivered not more than seven words termi- 
nate in u, and expresses his astonishment that we do 
not find a greater monotony in the constant recurrence 
of only four rhymes.* The reason may be that in 
Italian poetry the rhyme falls both upon the penultima 
and the final syllable of each verse ; and, as these two 
syllables in the same word turn upon different vowels, 
a greater variety is given to the melody. This double 
rhyming termination, moreover, gives an inexpressible 
lightness and delicacy to Italian poetry, very different 
from the broad comic which similar compound rhymes, 
no doubt from the infrequency of their application to 
serious subjects, communicate to the English. 

Ariosto is commonly most admired for the inexhaust- 
ible fertility of his fancy; yet a large proportion of his 

Of swarming bees, did cast him in a swowne ; 
No other noyes nor people's troublous cryes, 

As still are wont to annoy the walled towne, 
Might there be heard; but careless quiet lyes, 
Wrapt in eternall silence farre from enemyes." 

* Lettre a Deodati di Tovazzi. 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 4I g 

fictions are borrowed, copied, or continued from those 
of preceding poets. The elegant allegories of ancient 
superstition, as they were collected or invented by 
Homer and Ovid, the wild adventures of the Norman 
romances, the licentious merriment of the gossiping 
fabliaux, and the enchantments of Eastern fable, have 
all been employed in the fabric of Ariosto's epic. But, 
although this diminishes his claims to an inventive 
fancy, yet, on the whole, it exalts his character as a 
poet ; for these same fictions under the hands of pre- 
ceding romancers, even of Boiardo, were cold and 
uninteresting, or, at best, raised in the mind of the 
reader only a stupid admiration, like that occasioned 
by the grotesque and unmeaning wonders of a fairy- 
tale. But Ariosto inspired them with a deep and living 
interest; he adorned them with the graces of senti- 
ment and poetic imagery, and enlivened them by a 
vein of wit and shrewd reflection. 

Ariosto's style is most highly esteemed by his coun- 
trymen. The clearness with which it expresses the 
most subtle and delicate beauties of sentiment may be 
compared to Alcina's 

" vel sottile e rado, 
Che non copria dinanzi ne di dietro, 
Piu che le rose o i gigli un chiaro vetro." — C. vii. s. 28.* 



&'&' 



We recollect no English poet whose manner in any 
degree resembles him. La Fontaine, the most exqui- 
site versifier of his nation, when in his least familiar 
mood, comes the nearest to him among the French. 

* "A thin transparent veil, 
That all the beauties of her form discloses, 
As the clear crystal doth th' imprison'd roses." 



420 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

Spence remarks that Spenser must have imagined 
Ariosto intended to write a serious romantic poem. 
The same opinion has been maintained by some of the 
Italian critics. Such, however, is not the impression we 
receive from it. Not to mention the broad farce with 
which the narrative is occasionally checkered, as the 
adventures of Giocondo, the Enchanted Cup, etc., a 
sly suppressed smile seems to lurk at the bottom even 
of his most serious reflections ; sometimes, indeed, it 
plays openly upon the surface of his narrative, but 
more frequently, after a beautiful and sober descrip- 
tion, it breaks out, as it were, from behind a cloud, and 
lights up the whole with a gay and comic coloring. It 
would seem as if the natural acuteness of his poetic 
taste led him to discern in the magnanime jnensogne 
of romantic fable abundant sources of the grand and 
beautiful, while the anti-chivalric character of his age, 
and, still more, the lively humor of his nation, led 
him to laugh at its extravagances. Hence the delicate 
intermixture of serious and comic, which gives a most 
agreeable variety, though somewhat of a curious per- 
plexity, to his style. 

The Orlando Furioso went through six editions in 
the author's lifetime, two of which he supervised, and 
it passed through sixty in the course of the same cen- 
tury. Its poetic pretensions were of too exalted a 
character to allow it to be regarded as a mere fairy- 
tale; but it sorely puzzled the pedantic critics, both of 
that and of the succeeding age, to find out a justification 
for admitting it, with all its fantastic eccentricities, into 
the ranks of epic poetry. Multitudes have attacked 
and defended it upon this ground, and justice was not 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 42 l 

rendered to it until the more enlightened criticism of a 
later day set all things right by pointing out the dis- 
tinction between the romantic and the classical. * 

The cold and precise Boileau, who, like most of his 
countrymen, seems to have thought that beauty could 
wear only one form, and to have mistaken the begin- 
nings of ancient art for its principles, quoted Horace 
to prove that no poet had the right to produce such 
grotesque combinations of the tragical and comic as 
are found in Ariosto.f In the last century, Voltaire, a 
critic of a much wider range of observation, objects to 
a narrow, exclusive definition of an epic poem, on the 
just ground "that works of imagination depend so 
much on the different languages and tastes of the dif- 
ferent nations among whom they are produced, that 
precise definitions must have a tendency to exclude all 
beauties that are unknown or unfamiliar to us." (JEssai 
sur la Poesie epique.') In less than forty pages farther 
we find, however, that " the Orlando Furioso, although 
popular with the mass of readers, is very inferior to the 
genuine epic poem. " Voltaire's general reflections were 
those of a philosopher ; their particular application was 
tlrat of a Frenchman. 

* Hurd and T. Warton seem to have been among the earliest Eng- 
lish writers who insisted upon the distinction between the Gothic and 
the classical. In their application of it to Spenser they display a 
philosophical criticism, guided not so much by ancient rules as by 
the peculiar genius of modern institutions. How superior this to the 
pedantic dogmas of the French school, or of such a caviller as 
Rymer, whom Dryden used to quote, and Pope extolled as "the best 
of English critics" ! 

| Dissertation critique sur l'Aventure de Joconde. GEuvres de 
Boileau, torn. ii. p. 151. 

16 



422 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

At a later period of his life he made a recantation 
of this precipitate opinion ; and he even went so far, 
in a parallel between the Furioso and the Odyssey, 
which he considered the model of the Italian poem, as 
to give a decided preference to the former. Ariosto's 
imitations of the Odyssey, however, are not sufficient to 
authorize its being considered the model of his epic. 
Where these imitations do exist, they are not always 
the happiest efforts of his muse. The tedious and 
disgusting adventure of the Ogre, borrowed from that 
of the Cyclops Polypheme, is one of the greatest blem- 
ishes in the Furioso. Such "Jack the giant-killing" 
horrors do not blend happily with the airy and eleganc 
fictions of the East. The familiarity of Ariosto's man- 
ner has an apparent resemblance to the simplicity of 
Homer's, which vanishes upon nearer inspection. The 
unaffected ease common to both resembles, in the 
Italian, the fashionable breeding that grows out of a 
perfect intimacy with the forms of good society. In 
the Greek it is rather an artlessness which results 
from never having been embarrassed by the conven- 
tional forms of society at all. Ariosto is perpetually 
addressing his reader in the most familiar tone of con- 
versation ; Homer pursues his course with the unde- 
viating dignity of an epic poet. He tells all his stories, 
even the incredible, with an air of confiding truth. 
The Italian poet frequently qualifies his with some sly 
reference or apology, as, " I will not vouch for it; I 
repeat only what Turpin has told-before me :" 

" Mettendo lo Turpin, lo metto anch' io.."* 

* Voltaire, with all his aversion to local prejudices, was too national 
to relish the naked simplicity of Homer. One of his witty reflections 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



423 



Ariosto's narratives are complicated and interrupted 
in a most provoking manner. This has given offence 
to some of his warmest admirers, and to the severe 
taste of Alfieri in particular. Yet this fault, if indeed 
it be one, seems imputable to the art, not to the artist. 
He but followed preceding romancers, and conformed 
to the laws of his peculiar species of poetry. This 
involution of the narrative may be even thought to 
afford a relief and an agreeable contrast, by its inter- 
mixture of grave and comic incidents ; at least, this 
is the apology set up for the same peculiarities of our 
own romantic drama. But, whatever exceptions may 
be taken by the acuteness or ignorance of critics at the 
conduct of the Orlando Furioso, the sagacity of its 
general plan is best vindicated by its wide and perma- 
nent popularity in its own country. None of their 
poets is so universally read by the Italians ; and the 
epithet divine, which the homage of an enlightened few 
had before appropriated to Dante, has been conferred 
by the voice of the whole nation upon the "Homer 
of Ferrara."* While those who copied the classical 
models of antiquity are forgotten, Ariosto, according 
to the beautiful eulogium of Tasso, " partendo dalle 
vestigie degli antichi scrittori e dalle regole d'Aris- 
totile, e letto e riletto da tutte l'eta, da tutti i sessi, 
noto a tutte le lingue, ringiovanisce sempre nella sua 
fama, e vola glorioso per le lingue de' mortali."*)" 

may show how he esteemed him. Speaking of Virgil's obligations 
to the Greek poet, "Some say," he observes, "that Homer made 
Virgil; if so, this is, without doubt, the best work he ever made!" 
si cela est, c est sans doute son plus bel otivrage. 

* The name originally given to him by his rival Tasso. 

f Discorsi Poetiei, p. 33. 



424 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



The name of Ariosto most naturally suggests this of 
Tasso, his illustrious but unfortunate rival in the same 
brilliant career of epic poetry ; for these two seem to 
hold the same relative rank, and to shed a lustre over 
the Italian poetry of the sixteenth century like that 
reflected by Dante and Petrarch upon the fourteenth. 
The interest always attached to the misfortunes of 
genius has been heightened, in the case of Tasso, by 
the veil of mystery thrown over them ; and while his 
sorrows have been consecrated by the "melodious tear" 
of the poet, the causes of them have furnished a most 
fruitful subject of speculation to the historian. 

He had been early devoted by his father to the study 
of jurisprudence, but, as with Ariosto, a love for the 
Muses seduced him from his severer duties. His father 
remonstrated; but Tasso, at the age of seventeen, pro- 
duced his Rinaldo, an epic in twelve cantos, and the 
admiration which it excited throughout Italy silenced 
all future opposition on the part of his parent. In 
1565, Tasso, then twenty-one years of age, was received 
into the family of the Cardinal Luigi d'Este, to whom 
he had dedicated his precocious epic'. The brilliant 
assemblage of rank and beauty at the little court of 
Ferrara excited the visions of the youthful poet, while 
its richly-endowed libraries and learned societies fur- 
nished a more solid nourishment to his understanding. 
Under these influences, he was perpetually giving some 
new display of his poetic talent. His vein flowed 
freely in lyrical composition, and he is still regarded 
as one of the most perfect models in that saturated 
species of national poetry. In 1573 he produced his 
Aminta, which, in spite of its conceits and pastoral 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



425 



extravagances, exhibited such a union of literary finish 
and voluptuous sentiment as was to be found in no 
other Italian poem. It was translated into all the 
cultivated tongues in Europe, and was followed, during 
the lifetime of its author, by more than twenty imita- 
tions in Italy. No valuable work ever gave birth to a 
more worthless progeny. The Pasto?' Fido of Guarini 
is by far the best of these imitations ; but its elaborate 
luxury of wit is certainly not comparable to the simple, 
unsolicited beauties of the original. Tasso was, how- 
ever, chiefly occupied with the composition of his great 
epic. He had written six cantos in a few months, but 
he was nearly ten years in completing it. He wrote 
with the rapidity of genius, but corrected with scrupu- 
lous deliberation. His "Letters" show the unwearied 
pains which he took to obtain the counsel of his friends, 
and his critical "Discourses" prove that no one could 
stand less in need of such counsel than himself. In 
1575 he completed his "Jerusalem Delivered." Thus, 
before he had reached his thirty-second year, Tasso, as 
a lyric, epic, and dramatic writer, may be fairly said to 
have earned a threefold immortality in the highest 
walks of his art. His subsequent fate shows that 
literary glory rests upon no surer basis than the acci- 
dental successes of worldly ambition. 

The long and rigorous imprisonment of Tasso by 
the sovereign over whose reign his writings had thrown 
such a lustre has been as fruitful a source of specula- 
tion as the inexplicable exile of Ovid, and, in like 
manner, was for a long time imputed to an indiscreet 
and too aspiring passion in the poet. At length Tira- 
boschi announced, in an early edition of his history, 

?6* ' 



j v 



426 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

that certain letters and original manuscripts of Tasso, 
lately discovered in the library of Modena, had been 
put into the hands of the Abbe Serassi for the farther 
investigation of the mysterious transaction. The 
abbe's work appeared in 1785, and the facts disclosed 
by it clearly prove that the poet's passion for Leonora 
was not, as formerly imagined, the origin of his mis- 
fortunes.* These may be imputed to a variety of cir- 
cumstances, none of which, however, would have deeply 
affected a person of a less irritable or better disciplined 
fancy. The calumnies and petty insults which he ex- 
perienced from his rivals at the court of Ferrara, a 
clandestine attempt to publish his poem, but, more 
than all, certain conscientious scruples which he enter- 
tained as to the orthodoxy of his own creed, gradually 
wrought upon his feverish imagination to such a degree 
as in a manner to unsettle his reason. He fancied that 
his enemies were laying snares for his life, and that 
they had concerted a plan for accusing him of heresy 
before the Inquisition. f He privately absconded from 
Ferrara, returned to it again, but soon after, disquieted 

* We are only acquainted with Serassi's " Life of Tasso" through 
the epitomes of Fabroni and Ginguene\ The latter writer seems to 
us to lay greater stress upon the poet's passion for Leonora than is 
warranted by his facts. Tasso dedicated, it is true, many an elegant 
sonnet to her charms, and distorted her name into as many ingenious 
puns as did Petrarch that of his mistress ; but when we consider that 
this sort of poetical tribute is very common with the Italians, that 
the lady was at least ten years older than the poet, and that, in the 
progress of this passion, he had four or five other well-attested sub- 
ordinate flames, we shall have little reason to believe it produced a 
deep impression on his character. 

f His " Letters" betray the same timid jealousy. He is perpetually 
complaining that his correspondence is watched and intercepted. 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



427 



by the same unhappy suspicions, left it precipitately a 
second time, without his manuscripts, without money 
or any means of subsistence, and, after wandering from 
court to court, and experiencing, in the sorrowful lan- 
guage of Dante, 

" Come sa di sale 
Lo pane altrui, e com' e duro calle 
Lo scendere e '1 salir per l'altrui scale,"* 

he threw himself once more upon the clemency of 
Alphonso ; but the duke, already alienated from him 
by his past extravagances, was incensed to such a de- 
gree by certain intemperate expressions of anger in 
which the poet indulged on his arrival at the court, 
that he caused him to be confined in a mad-house 
(Hospital of St. Anne). 

Here, in the darkness and solitude of its meanest 
cell, disturbed only by the cries of the wretched in- 
mates of the mansion, he languished two years under 
the severest discipline of a refractory lunatic. Mon- 
taigne, in his visit to Italy, saw him in this humiliating 
situation, and his reflections upon it are even colder 
than those which usually fall from the phlegmatic 
philosopher, f The genius of Tasso, however, broke 

* " How salt the savor is of others' bread, 

How hard the passage to descend and climb 
Ey others' stairs." — Cary. 

f " I felt even more spite than compassion to see him in so miser- 
able a state, surviving, as it were, himself, unmindful either of him- 
self or his works, which, without his concurrence, and before his eyes, 
were published to the world incorrect and deformed." (Essais de 
Montaigne, torn. v. p. 114.) Montaigne doubtless exaggerated the 
mental degradation of Tasso, since it favored a position which, in the 
vain love of paradox that has often distinguished his countrymen, he 
was then endeavoring to establish, viz., the superiority of stupidity 
and ignorance over genius. 



428 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

through the gloom of his dungeon, and several of the 
lyrical compositions of his imprisoned muse were as 
brilliant and beautiful as in the day of her prosperity. 
The distempered state of his imagination seems never 
to have clouded the vividness of his perceptions on the 
subjects of his composition, and during the remaining 
five years of his confinement at St. Anne he wrote, in 
. the form of dialogues, several highly-esteemed disqui- 
sitions on philosophical and moral theorems. During 
this latter period Tasso had enjoyed a more commo- 
dious apartment, but the duke, probably dreading some 
literary reprisal from his injured prisoner, resisted all 
entreaties for his release. This was at length effected, 
through the intercession of the Prince of Mantua, in 
1586. 

Tasso quitted Ferrara without an interview with his 
oppressor, and spent the residue of his days in the 
south of Italy. His countrymen, affected by his un- 
merited persecutions, received him wherever he passed 
with enthusiastic triumph. The nobility and the citi- 
zens of Florence waited upon him in a body, as if to 
make amends for the unjust strictures of their academy 
upon his poem, and a day was appointed by the court 
of Rome for his solemn coronation in the capitol with 
the poetic wreath which had formerly encircled the 
brow of Petrarch. He died a few days before the 
intended ceremony. His body, attired in a Roman 
toga, was accompanied to the grave by nobles and 
ecclesiastics of the highest dignity, and his temples 
were decorated with the laurel of which his perverse 
fortune had defrauded him when living. 

The unhappy fate of Tasso has affixed a deep stain 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



429 



on the character of Alphonso the Second. The eccen- 
tricities of his deluded fancy could not have justified 
seven years of solitary confinement, either as a medi- 
cine or as a punishment, least of all from the man 
whose name he had so loudly celebrated in one of the 
most glorious productions of modern genius. What a 
caustic commentary upon his unrelenting rigor must 
Alphonso have found in one of the opening stanzas of 
the Jerusalem : 

" Tu, magnanimo Alfonso, il qual ritogli 

Al furor di fortuna, e guidi in porto 
Me peregrino errante, e fra gli scogli 

E fra l'onde agitato, e quasi assorto ; 
Queste mie carte in lieta fronte accogli,".etc. 

The illiberal conduct of the princes of Este both 
towards Ariosto and Tasso essentially diminishes their 
pretensions to the munificent patronage so exclusively 
imputed to them by their own historians and by the 
eloquent pen of Gibbon.* A more accurate picture, 
perhaps, of the second Alphonso may be found in the 
concluding canto of Childe Harold, where the poet, in 
the language of indignant sensibility, not always so 

* Muratori's Antichita Estensi are expressly intended to record the 
virtues of the family of Este. Tiraboschi's Storia della Letteratura 
Italiana is a splendid panegyric upon the intellectual achievements 
of the whole nation. More than a due share of this praise, however, 
is claimed for his native princes of Ferrara. It is amusing to see by 
what evasions the historian attempts to justify their conduct both 
towards Tasso and Ariosto. Gibbon, who had less apology for par- 
tiality, in his laborious researches into the " Antiquities of the House 
of Brunswick" has not tempered his encomiums of the Alphonsos 
with a single animadversion upon their illiberal conduct towards their 
two illustrious subjects. 



43° 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



judiciously directed, has rendered more than poetical 
justice to the "antique brood of Este." 

The Jerusalem was surreptitiously published, for the 
first time, during Tasso's imprisonment, and, notwith- 
standing the extreme inaccuracy of its early editions, 
it went through no less than six in as many months. 
Others grew rich on the productions of an author who 
was himself languishing in the most abject poverty, — 
one example out of many of the insecurity of literary 
property in a country where the number of distinct 
independent governments almost defeats the protection 
of a copyright.* 

Notwithstanding the general admiration which the 
Jerusalem excited throughout Italy, it was assailed, on 
its first appearance, with the coarsest criticism it ever 
experienced. A comparison was naturally suggested 
between it and the Orlando Furioso, and the Italians 
became divided into the factions of Tassisti and Ari- 
ostisti. The Della-Cruscan Academy, just then insti- 
tuted, in retaliation of some extravagant encomiums 
bestowed on the Jerusalem, entered into an accurate 
but exceedingly intemperate analysis of it, in which 
they degraded it not only below the rival epic, but, 
denying it the name of a /<?<?//*, spoke of it as "a cold 
and barren compilation." It is a curious fact that both 
the Della-Cruscan and French Academies commenced 
their career of criticism with an unlucky attack upon 

* " Foreigners," says Denina, "who ask if there are great writers 
in Italy now, as in times past, would be surprised at the number, were 
they to learn how much even the best of them are brought in debt by 
the publication of their own works." Vicende della Letteratura, torn. 
ii. p. 326. 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



43 1 



two of the most extraordinary poems in their respective 
languages.* 

Although Tasso was only one-and-twenty years of 
age when he set about writing his Jerusalem, yet it is 
sufficiently apparent, from the sagacious criticism ex- 
hibited in his letters, that he brought to it a mind 
ripened by extensive studies and careful meditation. 
He had, moreover, the advantage of an experience 
derived both from his own previous labors and those 
of several distinguished predecessors in the same kind 
of composition. The learned Trissino had fashioned, 
some years before, a regular heroic poem, with pedan- 
tic precision, upon the models of antiquity. From 
this circumstance, it was so formal and tedious that 
nobody could read it. Bernardo Tasso, the father of 
Torquato, who might apply to himself, with equal 
justice, the reverse of the younger Racine's lament, 

" Et moi pere inconnu d'un si glorieux fils," 

had commenced his celebrated Amadis with the same 
deference to the rules of Aristotle. Finding that the 
audiences of his friends, to whom he was accustomed 
to read the epic as it advanced, gradually thinned off, 
he had the discretion to take the hint, and new-cast it 
in a more popular and romantic form. Notwithstanding 
these inauspicious examples, Tasso was determined to 
give to his national literature what it so much wanted, 
a great heroic poem ; his fine eye perceived at once, 
however, all the advantages to be derived from the 

* It is hardly necessary to refer to Corneille's " Cid," so clumsily 
anatomized by the Academie Francaise at the jealous instigation of 
Cardinal Richelieu. 



43 2 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



peculiar institutions of the moderns, and, while he 
conformed, in the general plan of his epic, to the pre- 
cepts of antiquity, he animated it with the popular and 
more exalted notions of love, of chivalry, and of re- 
ligion. His Jerusalem exhibits a perfect combination 
of the romantic and the classical. 

The subject which he selected was most happily 
adapted to his complicated design. However gloomy 
a picture the Crusades may exhibit to the rational his- 
torian, they are one of the most brilliant and imposing 
ever offered to the eye of the poet. It is surprising 
that a subject so fruitful in marvellous and warlike ad- 
venture, and which displays the full triumph of Chris- 
tian chivalry, should have been so long neglected by 
the writers of epical romance. The plan of the Jeru- 
salem is not without defects, which have been pointed 
out by the Italians, and bitterly ridiculed by Voltaire, 
whose volatile sarcasms have led him into one or two 
blunders that have excited much wrath among some of 
Tasso's countrymen.* The conceits which occasion- 
ally glitter on the surface of Tasso's clear and polished 
style have afforded another and a fair ground for cen- 
sure. Boileau's metaphorical distich, however, has 
given to them an undeserved importance. The epi- 
thet tinsel (clinquant), used by him without any limita- 
tion, was quoted by his countrymen as fixing the value 

* Among other heinous slanders, he had termed the musical bird 
" di color vari" " e purpureo rostro" in Armida's gardens a "parrot," 
and the "fatal Donzella" (canto xv.), "whose countenance was beau- 
tiful like that of the angels," an " ola 7 woman ," which his Italian cen- 
sor assures his countrymen " is much worse than a vecchia donna." 
For the burst of indignation which these and similar sins brought 
upon Voltaire's head, vide Annotazioni di Canti xv., xvi., Clas. Ital. 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 433 

at once of all Tasso's compositions, and afterwards, 
by an easy transition, of that of the whole body of 
Italian literature. Eoileau subsequently diluted this 
censure of the Italian poet with some partial commen- 
dations;* but its ill effects were visible in the unfavor- 
able prejudices which it left on the minds of his own 
countrymen, and on those of the English, for nearly 
a century. 

The affectations imputed to Tasso are to be traced 
to a much more remote origin. Petrarch's best pro- 
ductions are stained with them, as are those of pre- 
ceding poets, Cino da Pistoja, Guido Cavalcanti, and 
others,"}" and they seem to have flowed directly from 
the Provencal, the copious fountain of Italian lyrical 
poetry. Tiraboschi referred their introduction to the 
influence of Spanish literature under the viceroys of 
Naples during the latter part of the sixteenth century, 
which provoked a patriotic replication, in seven vol- 
umes, from the Spanish Abbe Lampillas. The Italian 

* Both Ginguene and some Italian critics affect to consider these 
commendations as an amende honorable on the part of Boileau. 
They, however, amount to very little, and, like the Frenchman's 
compliment to Yorick, have full as much of bitter as of sweet in 
them. The remarks quoted by D' Olivet (Histoire de l'Academie 
Francaise) as having' been made by the critic a short time previous 
to his death, are a convincing proof, on the other hand, that he was 
tenacious to the last of his original heresy. " So little," said he, 
"have I changed, that, on reviewing Tasso of late, I regretted ex- 
ceedingly that I had not been more explicit in my strictures upon 
him." He then goes en to supply the hiatus by taking up all the 
blemishes in detail which he had before only alluded to en g7~os. 

f These veteran versifiers have been condensed into two volumes 
8vo, in an edition published at Florence, 1816, under the title of Poeti 
del Primo Secolo. 

t 37 



434 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



had the better of his adversary in temper, if not in 
argument. This false refinement was brought to its 
height during the first half of the seventeenth century, 
under Marini and his imitators, and it is somewhat ma- 
liciously intimated by Denina that the foundation of 
the Academy Delia Crusca corresponds with the coin- 
mencement of the decay of good taste.* Some of their 
early publications prove that they have at least as good 
a claim to be considered its promoters as Tasso.f 

Tasso is the most lyrical of all epic poets. This 
often weakens the significance and picturesque delinea- 
tion of his narrative, by giving to it an ideal and too 
general character. His eight-line stanza is frequently 
wrought up, as it were, into a miniature sonnet. He 
himself censures Ariosto for occasionally indulging 
this lyrical vein in his romance, and cites as an exam- 
ple the celebrated comparison of the virgin and the 
rose (canto L, s. 42). How many similar examples 
may be found in his own epic ! The gardens of 

* Vicende della Letteratura, torn. ii. p. 52. 

j" A distinction seems to be authorized between the ancients and 
the moderns in regard to what is considered purity of taste. The 
earliest writings of the former are distinguished by it, and it fell info 
decay only with the decline of the nation; while a vicious taste is 
visible in the earliest stages of modern literature, and it has been 
corrected only by the corresponding refinement of the nation. The 
Greek language was written in classic purity from Homer until long 
after Greece herself had become tributary to the Romans, and the 
Latin tongue from the time of Terence till the nation had sacrificed 
its liberties to its emperors ; while the early Italian authors, as we 
have already seen, the Spaniards in the age of Ferdinand, the Eng- 
lish in that of Elizabeth, and the French under Francis the First (the 
epochs which may fix the dawn of their respective literatures), seem 
to have been deeply infected with a passion for conceits and quibbles, 
which has been purified only by the diligent cultivation of ages. 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



435 



Armida are full of them. To this cause we may per- 
haps ascribe the glittering affectations, the clinquant, 
so often noticed in his poetry. Dazzling and epigram- 
matic points are often solicited in sonnets. To the 
same cause may be referred, in part, the nicely-adjusted 
harmony of his verses. It would almost seem as if 
each stanza was meant to be set to music, as Petrarch 
is known to have composed many of his odes with this 
view.* The melodious rhythm of Tasso's verse has 
none of the monotonous sweetness so cloying in Me- 
tastasio. It is diversified by all the modulations of an 
exquisitely sensible ear. For this reason, no Italian 
poet is so frequently in the mouths of the common 
people. Ariosto's familiar style and lively narrative 
are better suited to the popular apprehension ; but the 
lyrical melody of Tasso triumphs over these advantages 
in his rival, and enables him literally virum volitare per 
ora. It was once common for the Venetian gondoliers 
to challenge each other and to respond in the verses 
of the Jerusalem, and this sort of musical contest might 
be heard for hours in the silence of a soft summer 
evening. The same beautiful ballads, if we may so call 
these fragments of an epic, are still occasionally chanted 
by the Italian peasant, who is less affected by the sub- 
limity of their sentiments than the musical flow of the 
expression, j* 

Tasso's sentiments are distinguished, in our opinion, 

* Foscolo, " Essay," etc., p. 93. 

"j" " The influence of metrical harmony is visible in the lower 
classes, who commit to memory the stanzas of Tasso, and sing them 
without comprehending them. They even disfigure the language so 
as to make nonsense of it, their senses deceived all the while by the 
unmeaning melody." Pignotti, Storia, etc., torn. iv. p. 192. 












436 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

by a moral grandeur surpassing that of any other Italian 
poet. His devout mind seems to have been fully inspired 
with the spirit of his subject. We say in our opinion, 
for an eminent German critic, F. Schlegel, is disposed 
to deny him this merit. We think in this instance he 
must have proposed to himself what is too frequent 
with the Germans, — an ideal and exaggerated standard 
of elevation. A few stanzas (st. 1 to 19) in the fourth 
canto of the Jerusalem may be said to contain almost 
the whole argument of the Paradise Lost. The convo- 
cation of the devils in the dark abyss,* the picture of 
Satan, whom he injudiciously names Pluto, his sublime 
address to his confederates, in which he alludes to their 
rebellion and the subsequent creation of man, were the 
germs of Milton's most glorious conceptions. Dante 
had before shadowed forth Satan, but it was only in the 
physical terrors of a hideous aspect and gigantic stature. 
The ancients had clothed the Furies in the same external 
deformities. Tasso, in obedience to the superstitions 
of his age, gave to the devil similar attributes, but he 
invested his character with a moral sublimity which 
raised it to the rank of divine intelligences : 

" Ebbero i piu. felici allor vittoria 
Rimase a noi d'invitto ardir la gloria." 

" Sia destin cid ch'io voglio." 

* The semi-stanza which describes the hoarse reverberations of the 
infernal trumpet in this Pandemonium is cited by the Italians as a 
happy example of imitative harmony: 

" Chiama gli abitator dell' ombre eterne 
II rauco suon della tartarea tromba. 
T reman le spaziose atre caverne, 

E l'aer cieco a quel romor rimbomba." 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 437 

In the literal version of Milton, 

" What I will is fate." 

Sentiments like these also give to Satan, in Paradise 
Lost, his superb and terrific majesty. Milton, how- 
ever, gave a finer finish to the portrait, by dispensing 
altogether with the bugbear deformities of his person, 
and by depicting it as a form that 

" Had yet not lost 
All its original brightness, nor appear' d 
Less than archangel ruin'd." 

It seems to us a capital mistake in Tasso to have 
made so little use of the diablerie which he has so 
powerfully portrayed. Almost all the machinations of 
the infidels in the subsequent cantos turn upon the 
agency of petty necromancers. 

Tasso frequently deepens the expression of his pic- 
tures by some skilful moral allusion. How finely has 
he augmented the misery of the soldier perishing under 
a consuming drought before the walls of Jerusalem, 
by recalling to his imagination the cool and crystal 
waters with which he had once been familiar ! 

" Se alcun giammai tra frondeggianti rive 
Puro vide stagnar liquido argento, 
O giu precipitose ir acque vive 

Per Alpe, o'n piaggia erbosa a passo lento ; 
Quelle al vago desio forma e descrive, 
E ministra materia al suo tormento ; 
Che l'imagine lor gelida e molle 

L'asciuga e scalda, e nel pensier ribolle."* 

Canto xiii., st. 60. 

* " He that the gliding rivers erst had seen 

Adown their verdant channels gently roll'd, 
Or falling streams, which to the valleys green 
Distill'd from tops of Alpine mountains cold, 



438 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



In all the manifold punishments of Dante's "Hell" 
we remember one only in which the mind is made use 
of as a means of torture. A counterfeiter (barratiere) 
contrasts his situation in these dismal regions with his 
former pleasant residence in the green vale of the Arno ; 
an allusion which adds a new sting to his anguish and 
gives a fine moral coloring to the picture. Dante was 
the first great Christian poet that had written ; and 
when, in conformity with -the charitable spirit of his 
age, he assigned all the ancient heathens a place either 
in his hell or purgatory, he inflicted upon them corporeal 
punishments which alone had been threatened by their 
poets. 

Both Ariosto and Tasso elaborated the style of their 
compositions with infinite pains. This labor, however, 
led them to the most opposite results. It gave to the 
Furioso the airy graces of elegant conversation ; to the 
Gerusalemme a stately and imposing eloquence. In 
this last you may often find a consummate art carried 
into affectation, as in the former natural beauty is 
sometimes degraded into vulgarity, and even obscenity. 
Ariosto has none of the national vices of style imputed 
to his rival, but he is tainted with the less excusable 
impurities of sentiment. It is stated by a late writer 
that the exceptionable passages in the Furioso were 
found crossed out with a pen in a manuscript copy of 
the author, showing his intention to have suppressed 
them at some future period. The fact does not appear 
probable, since the edition as it now stands, with all 

Those he desired in vain, new torments been 
Augmented thus with wish of comforts old ; 
Those waters cool he drank in vain conceit, 
Which more increased his thirst, increased his heat." — Fairfax. 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 439 

its original blemishes, was revised and published by 
himself the year of his death. 

Tasso possessed a deeper, a more abstracted and 
lyrical turn of thought. Ariosto infuses an active 
worldly spirit into his poetry ; his beauties are social, 
while those of his rival are rather of a solitary com- 
plexion. Ariosto' s muse seems to have caught the 
gossiping spirit of the fabliaux, and Tasso' s the lyr- 
ical refinements of the Provencal. Ariosto is seldom 
sublime like the other. This may be imputed to 
his subject, as well as to the character of his genius. 
Owing to his subject, he is more generally entertaining. 
The easy freedom of his narrative often leads him into 
natural details much more affecting than the ideal gen- 
eralization of Tasso. How pathetic is the dying scene 
of Brandi marte, with the half-finished name of his 
mistress, Fiordiligi, upon his lip : 

" Orlando, fa che ti raccordi 
Di me nell' orazion tue grate a Dio ; 

Ne men ti raccomando la mia Fiordi .... 
Ma dir non pote ligi ; e qui finio."* 

Tasso could never have descended to this beautiful 
negligence of expression, f 

* "Orlando, I implore thee 
That in thy prayers my name may be commended, 
And to thy care I leave my loved Fiordi — 
Ligi he could not add ; but here he ended." 

f The ideal, which we have imputed to Tasso, may be cited, how- 
ever, as a characteristic of the national literature, and as the point in 
which their literature is most decidedly opposed to our own. With 
the exception of Dante and Parini, whose copies from life have all 
the precision of proof-impressions, it would be difficult to find a pic- 
ture in the compass of Italian poetry executed with the fidelity to na- 



440 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

Tasso challenged a comparison with his predecessor in 
his gardens of Armida. The indolent and languishing 
repose of the one, the brisk, amorous excitement of the 
other, are in some measure characteristic of their differ- 
ent pencils. The parallel has been too often pursued 
for us to weary our readers with it. 

The Italians have a copious variety of narrative 
poetry, and are very nice in their subdivisions of it. 
Without attending to these, we have been guided by 
its chronological succession. We have hardly room 
to touch upon the " Secchia Rapita" ("Rape of the 
Bucket") of Tassoni, the model of the mock-heroic 
poems afterwards frequent in Italy,* of Boileau's " Lu- 
trin/' and of the "Rape of the Lock." Tassoni, its 
author, was a learned and noble Modenese, who, after 

ture so observable in our good authors, so apparent in every page of 
Cowper or Thomson, for example. It might be well, perhaps, for the 
English artist, if he could embellish the minute and literal details of 
his own school with some of the ideal graces of the Italian. Byron 
may be considered as having done this more effectually than any 
contemporary poet. Byron's love of the ideal, it must be allowed, 
however, has too often bewildered him in mysticism and hyperbole. 

* The Italians long disputed with great acrimony whether this or 
the comic-heroic poem of Bracciolini (Lo Scherno degli Dei) was 
precedent in point of age. It appears probable that Tassoni's was 
written first, although printed last. No country has been half so 
fruitful as Italy in literary quarrels, and in none have they been pur- 
sued with such bitterness and pertinacity. In some instances, as in 
that of Maririi, they have even been maintained by assassination. The 
sarcastic commentaries of Galileo upon the "Jerusalem," quoted in 
the vulgar edition of the " Classics," were found sadly mutilated by 
one of the offended Tassisti, into whose hands they had fallen more 
than two centuries after they were written ; so long does a literary 
faction last in Italy ! The Italians, inhibited from a free discussion 
on political or religious topics, entered with incredible zeal into those 
of a purely abstract and often unimportant character. 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



441 



a life passed in the heats of literary controversies, to 
which he had himself given rise, died 1635, aged 
seventy-one. The subject of the poem is a war be- 
tween Modena and Bologna, at the commencement of 
the thirteenth century, in consequence of a wooden 
bucket having been carried off from the market-place 
in the latter city by an invading party of the former. 
This memorable trophy has been preserved down to 
the present day in the cathedral' of Modena. Tassoni's 
epic will confer upon it a more lasting existence. 

" The Bucket, which so sorely had offended, 

In the Great Tower, where yet it may be found, 

Was from on high by ponderous chain suspended, 
And with a marble cope environ 'd round. 

By portals five the entrance is defended ; 
Nor cavalier of note is that way bound, 

Nor pious pilgrim, but doth pause to see 

The spoil so glorious of the victory." — Canto i., st. 63. 

Gironi, in his life of the poet, triumphantly adduces, 
in evidence of the superiority of. the Italian epic over 
the French mock-heroic poem of Boileau, that the 
subject of the former is far more insignificant than 
that of the latter, and yet the poem has twelve cantos, 
being twice the number of the Lutrin. He might 
have added that each canto contains about six hundred 
lines instead of two hundred, the average complement 
of the French, so that Tassoni's epic has the glory of 
being twelve times as long as Boileau' s, and all about a 
bucket ! This is somewhat characteristic of the Italians. 
What other people would good-humoredly endure such 
an interminable epic i^pon so trivial an affair, which 
had taken place more than four centuries before ? To 






442 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



make amends, however, for the want of pungency in a 
satire on transactions of such an antiquated date, Tas- 
soni has besprinkled his poem very liberally with allu- 
sions to living characters. 

We may make one general objection to the poem, 
that it is often too much in earnest for the perfect 
keeping of the mock-heroic. The cutting of throats 
and fighting regular pitched battles are too bloody a 
business for a joke. How much more in the genuine 
spirit of this species of poetry is the bloodless battle 
with the books in the Lutrin ! 

The machinery employed by Tassoni is composed 
of the ancient heathen deities. These are frequently 
brought upon the stage, and are travestied with the 
coarsest comic humor. But the burlesque which re- 
duces great things to little is of a grosser and much 
less agreeable sort than that which magnifies little 
things into great. The "Rape of the Lock" owes its 
charms to the latter process. The importance which 
it gives to the elegant nothings of high life, its per- 
petual sparkling of wit, the fairy fretwork which con- 
stitutes its machinery, have made it superior, as a fine 
piece of irony, to either of its foreign rivals. A 
Frenchman would doubtless prefer the epic regularity, 
progressive action, and smooth seesaw versification of 
the Lutrin;* while an Italian would find sufficient in 
the grand heroic sentiment and the voluptuous por- 



* The versification of the Lutrin is esteemed as faultless as any in 
the language. The tame and monotonous flow of the best of French 
rhyme, however, produces an effect, at least upon a foreign ear, which 
has been well likened by one of their own nation to " the drinking of 
cold water." 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 443 

traiture with which Tassoni's unequal poem is occa- 
sionally inlaid, to justify his preference of it. There 
is no accounting for national taste. La Harpe, the 
Aristarchus of French critics, censures the gossamer 
machinery of the "Rape of the Lock" as the greatest 
defect in the poem. "La. fable des Sylphes, que Pope 
a tres-inutilement empruntee du Conte de Gabalis, 
pour en faire le merveilleux de son poeme, n'y produit 
rien d" 1 agreable, rien d' inter ess ant f 

Italy, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, 
was inundated with crude and insipid romances, dis- 
tributed into all the varieties of epic poetry. The last 
one, however, of sufficient importance to require our 
notice, namely, the Ricciardetto of Nicholas Forti- 
guerra, appeared as late as 1738. After two centuries 
of marvellous romance, Charlemagne and his paladins 
became rather insipid dramatis personce. What could 
not be handled seriously, however, might be ridiculed ; 
and the smile half suppressed by Ariosto and Berni 
broke out into broad buffoonery in the poem of Forti- 
guerra. 

The Ricciardetto may be considered the Don Quixote 
of Italy; for although it did not bring about that revo- 
lution in the national taste ascribed to the Spanish 
romance, yet it is, like that, an unequivocal parody 
upon the achievements of knight-errantry. It may be 
doubted whether Don Quixote itself was not the con- 
sequence rather than the cause of the revolution in the 
national taste. Fortiguerra pursued an opposite method 
to Cervantes, and, instead of introducing his crack- 
brained heroes into the realities of vulgar life, he made 
them equally ridiculous by involving them in the most 



444 



BIOGRAPHICAL A AW 



absurd caricatures of romantic fiction. Many of these 
adventures are of a licentious, and sometimes of a 
disgusting, nature ; but the graceful though negligent 
beauties of his style throw an illusive veil over the 
grossness of the narrative. Imitations of Pulci may 
be more frequently traced than of any other romantic 
poet. But, although more celebrated writers are occa- 
sionally, and the extravagances of chivalry are perpet- 
ually, parodied by Fortiguerra, yet his object does not 
seem to have been deliberate satire so much as good- 
humored jesting. What he wrote was for the simple 
purpose of raising a laugh, not for the derision or the 
correction of the taste of his countrymen. The tend- 
ency of his poem is certainly satirical, yet there is not 
a line indicating such an intention on his part. The 
most pointed humor is aimed at the clergy.* Forti- 
guerra was himself a canon. He commenced his epic 
at the suggestion of some friends with whom he was 
passing a few weeks of the autumn at a hunting-seat. 
The conversation turned upon the labor bestowed by 
Pulci, Berni, and Ariosto on their great poems; and 
Fortiguerra undertook to furnish, the next day, a canto 

* One of the leading characters is Ferragus, who had figured in all 
the old epics as one of the most formidable Saracen chieftains. He 
turns hermit with Fortiguerra, and beguiles his lonely winter evenings 
with the innocent pastime of making candles : 

" E ne l'orrida bruma, 
Quando l'aria e piu fredda, e piu crudele, 
Io mi diverto in far delle candele." — iii. 53. 

A contrast highly diverting to the Italians, who had been taught to 
associate very lofty ideas with the name of Ferragus. The conflict 
kept up between the devout scruples of the new saint and his old 
heathen appetites affords perpetual subjects for the profane comi. 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



445 



of good poetry exhibiting some of the peculiarities of 
their respective styles. He fulfilled his promise, and 
his friends, delighted with its sprightly graces, per- 
suaded him to pursue the epic to its present comple- 
ment of thirty cantos. Any one acquainted with the 
facilities for improvisation afforded by the flexible or- 
ganization of the Italian tongue will be the less surprised 
at the rapidity of this composition. The "Ricciar- 
detto" may be looked upon as a sort of improvisation. 
In the following literal version of the two opening 
stanzas of the poem we have attempted to convey some 
notion of the sportive temper of the original : 

" It will not let my busy brain alone ; 

The whim has taken me to write a tale, 
In poetry, of things till now unknown, 

Or if not wholly new, yet nothing stale. 
My muse is not a daughter of the Sun, 

With harp of gold and ebony ; a hale 
And buxom country lass, she sports at ease, 
And, free as air, sings to the passing breeze. 

" Yet, though accustom'd to the wood, — its spring 
Her only beverage, and her food its mast — 

She will of heroes and of battles sing, 
The loves and high emprizes of the past. 

Then, if she falter on so bold a wing, 
Light be the blame upon her errors cast ; 

She never studied ; and she well may err, 

Whose home hath been beneath the oak and fir." 

Fortiguerra's introductions to his cantos are seasoned 
with an extremely pleasant wit, which Lord Byron has 
attentively studied, and, in some passages of his more 
familiar poetry, closely imitated. The stanza, for exam- 
ple, in Beppo, beginning 

3§ 



446 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

" She was not old, nor young, nor at the years 
Which certain people call a certain age, 
Which yet the most uncertain age appears," etc., 

was evidently suggested by the following in " Ricciar- 
detto:" 

" Quando si giugne ad una certa eta, 
Ch'io non voglio descrivervi qual e, 

Bisogna stare allora a quel ch'un ha, 
Ne d'altro amante provar piu la fe, 

Perche, donne me care, la belta 

Ha 1' ali al capo, alle spalle, ed a' pie ; 

E vola si, che non si scorge piu 

Vestigio alcun ne' visi, dove fu." 

Byron's wit, however, is pointed with a keener sar- 
casm, and his serious reflections show a finer perception 
both of natural and moral beauty, than belong to the 
Italian. No two things are more remote from each 
other than sentiment and satire. In "Don Juan" they 
are found side by side in almost every stanza. The 
effect is disagreeable. The heart, warmed by some 
picture of extreme beauty or pathos, is suddenly chilled 
by a selfish sneer, a cold-blooded maxim, that makes 
you ashamed of having been duped into a good feeling 
by the writer even for a moment. It is a melancholy 
reflection that the last work of this extraordinary poet 
should be the monument alike of his genius and his 
infamy. Voltaire's licentious epic, the "Pucelle," is 
written in a manner, perhaps, more nearly correspond- 
ing to that of the Italian ; but the philosophical irony, 
if we may so call it, which forms the substratum of the 
more familiar compositions of this witty and profligate 
author is of somewhat too deep a cast for the light, 
superficial banter of Fortiguerra. 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



447 



We have now traced the course of Italian narrative 
poetry down to the middle of the last century. It has by 
no means become extinct since that period, and, among 
others, an author well known here by his history of 
our Revolutionary War has contributed his share to the 
epopee of his country, in his " Camillo, o Vejo Con- 
quistata." Almost every Italian writer has a poetic 
vein within him, which, if it does not find a vent in 
sonnets or canzones, will flow out into more formidable 
compositions.* 

In glancing over the long range of Italian narrative 
poems, one may be naturally led to the reflection that 
the most prolific branch of the national literature is 
devoted exclusively to purposes of mere amusement. 
Brilliant inventions, delicate humor, and a beautiful 
coloring of language are lavished upon all ; but, with 
the exception of the "Jerusalem," we rarely meet with 
sublime or ennobling sentiment, and very rarely with 
any thing like a moral or philosophical purpose. 
Madame de Stael has attempted to fasten a reproach 
on the whole body of Italian letters, "that, with the 
exception of their works on physical science, they 
have never been directed to utility. "\ The imputation 
applied in this almost unqualified manner is unjust. 
The language has been enriched by the valuable reflec- 
tions of too many historians, the solid labors of too 

* Boccaccio, Machiavelli, Bembo, Varchi, Castiglione, Pignotti, 
Botta, and a host of other classic prose writers of Italy, have all 
confessed the " impetus sacer," and given birth to epics, lyrics, or 
bucolics. 

f " Tous les ouvrages des Italiens, excepte ceux qui traitent des 
sciences physiques, n'ont jamais pour but l'utilite." De la Littera- 
ture, etc. 



448 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

many antiquaries and critics, to be thus lightly desig- 
nated. The learned lady may have found a model for 
her own comprehensive manner of philosophizing, and 
an ample refutation of her assertion, in Machiavelli 
alone.* In their works of imagination, however, such 
an imputation appears to be well merited. The Italians 
seem to demand from these nothing farther than from 
a fine piece of music, where the heart is stirred, the ear 
soothed, but the understanding not a whit refreshed. 
The splendid apparitions of their poet's fancy fade 
away from the mind of the reader, and, like the en- 
chanted fabrics described in their romances, leave not 
a trace behind them. 

In the works of fancy in our language, fiction is 
almost universally made subservient to more important 
and nobler purposes. The ancient drama, and novels, 
the modern prose drama, exhibit historical pictures of 
manners and accurate delineations of character. Most 
of the English poets in other walks, from the "moral 
Gower" to Cowper, Crabbe, and Wordsworth, have 
made their verses the elegant vehicles of religious or 
practical truth. Even descriptive poetry in England 

* We say manner, not spirit. The " Discorsi sopra T. Livio," 
however, require less qualification on the score of their principles. 
They obviously furnished the model to the "Grandeur et Decadence 
des Romains," and the same extended philosophy which Montesquieu 
imitated in civil history, Madame de Stael has carried into literary. 
Among the historians, antiquaries, etc., whose names are known 
where the language is not read, we might cite Guicciardini, Bembo, 
Sarpi, Giannone, Nardi, Davila, Denina, Muratori, Tiraboschi, Gra- 
vina, Bettinelli, Algarotti, Beccaria, Filangieri, Cesarotti, Pignotti, 
and many others ; a hollow muster-roll of names, that it would be 
somewhat ridiculous to run over did not their wide celebrity ex- 
pose in a stronger light Madame de StaeTs sweeping assertion. 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 449 

interprets the silence of external nature into a language 
of sentiment and devotion. It is characteristic of this 
spirit in the nation that Spenser, the only one of their 
classic writers who has repeated the fantastic legends 
of chivalry, deemed it necessary to veil his Italian 
fancy in a cloud of allegory, which, however it may 
be thought to affect the poem, shows unequivocally 
the didactic intention of the poet. 

These grave and extended views are seldom visible 
in the ornamental writing of the Italians. It rarely 
conveys useful information or inculcates moral or 
practical truth ; but it is too commonly an elegant, 
unprofitable pastime. Novelle, lyrical and epic poetry 
may be considered as constituting three principal 
streams of their lighter literature. These have con- 
tinued to flow, with little interruption, the two first 
from the "golden urns" of Petrarch and Boccaccio, 
the last from the early sources we have already traced 
down to the present day. Their multitudinous novelle, 
with all their varieties of tragic and comic incident, the 
last by far the most frequent, present few just portrait- 
ures of character, still fewer examples of sound ethics 
or wise philosophy.* In the exuberance of their son- 
nets and canzone, we find some, it is true, animated by 
an efficient spirit of religion or patriotism ; but too 
frequently they are of a purely amatory nature, the 
unsubstantial though brilliant exhalations of a heated 

* The heavier charge of indecency lies upon many. The Novelle 
of Casti, published as late as 1804, make the foulest tales of Boccac- 
cio appear fair beside them. They have run through several editions 
since their first appearance, and it tells not well for the land that a 
numerous class of readers can be found in it who take delight in 
banqueting upon such abominable offal. 

38* 



45° 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 









fancy. The pastoral drama, the opera, and other 
beautiful varieties of invention, which, under the titles 
of Bernesco, Burlesco, Maccheronico, and the like, 
have been nicely classed according to their different 
modifications of style and humor, while they manifest 
the mercurial temper and the originality of the nation, 
confirm the justice of our position. 

The native melody of the Italian tongue, by seducing 
their writers into an overweening attention to sound, 
has doubtless been in one sense prejudicial to their lit- 
erature. We do not mean to imply, in conformity with 
a vulgar opinion, that the language is deficient in en- 
ergy or compactness. Its harmony is no proof of its 
weakness. It allows more licenses of contraction than 
any other European tongue, and retains more than 
any other the vigorous inversions of its Latin original. 
Dante is the most concise of early moderns, and we 
know none superior to Alfieri in this respect among 
those of our own age. Davanzati's literal 'translation 
of Tacitus is condensed into a smaller compass than its 
original, the most sententious of ancient histories ; but 
still the silver tones of a language that almost sets itself 
to music as it is spoken must have an undue attraction 
for the harmonious ear of an Italian. Their very first 
classical model of prose composition is an obvious ex- 
ample of it. 

The frequency of improvisation is another circum- 
stance that has naturally tended to introduce a less 
serious and thoughtful habit of composition. Above 

a 

all, the natural perceptions of an Italian seem to be 
peculiarly sensible to beauty, independent of every 
other quality. Any one who has been in Italy must 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



451 



have recognized the glimpses of a pure taste through 
the rags of the meanest beggar. The musical pieces, 
when first exhibited at the theatre of San Carlo, are 
correctly pronounced upon by the lazzaroni of Naples, 
and the mob of Florence decide with equal accuracy 
upon the productions of their immortal school. Cel- 
lini tells us that he exposed his celebrated statue of 
Perseus in the public square by order of his patron, 
Duke Cosmo First, who declared himself perfectly sat- 
isfied with it on learning the commendations of the 
people.* It is not extraordinary that this exquisite 
sensibility to the beautiful should have also influenced 
them in literary art, and have led them astray some- 
times from the substantial and the useful. Who but 
an Italian historian would, in this practical age, so far 
blend fact and fiction as, for the sake of rhetorical 
effect, to introduce into the mouths of his personages 
sentiments and speeches never uttered by them, as 
Botta has lately done in his history of the American 
War? 

In justice, however, to the Italians, we must admit 
that the reproach incurred by too concentrated an 
attention to beauty, to the exclusion of more enlarged 
and useful views, in their lighter compositions, does not 
fall upon this or the last century. They have imbibed 
a graver and more philosophical cast of reflection, for 
which they seem partly indebted to the influence of 
English literature. Several of their most eminent au- 
thors have either visited or resided in Great Britain, 
and the genius of the language has been made known 
through the medium of skilful translations. Alfieri 
* Vita di Benvenuto Cellini, torn. ii. p. 339. 



452 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



has transported into his tragedies the solemn spirit 
and vigorous characterization peculiar to the English. 
He somewhere remarks that "he could not read the 
language ;" but we are persuaded his stern pen would 
never have traced the dying scene of Saul had he not 
witnessed a representation of Macbeth. Ippolito Pin- 
demonte, in his descriptive pieces, has deepened the 
tones of his native idiom with the moral melancholy 
of Gray and Cowper. Monti's compositions, both 
dramatic and miscellaneous, bear frequent testimony 
to his avowed admiration for Shakspeare ; and Cesa- 
rotti, Foscolo, and Pignotti have introduced the "se- 
verer muses" of the North to a still wider and more 
familiar acquaintance with their countrymen.* Lastly, 
among the works of fancy which attest the practical 
scope of Italian letters in the last century, we must not 
omit the " Giorno" of Parini, the most curious and 
nicely-elaborated specimen of didactic satire produced 
in any age or country. Its polished irony, pointed at 
the domestic vices of the Italian nobilitv. indicates 
both the profligacy of the nation and the moral inde- 
pendence of the poet. 

The Italian language, the first-born of those de- 
scended from the Latin, is also the most beautiful. It 
is not surprising that a people endowed with an exqui- 

* Both the prose and poetry of Foscolo are pregnant with more 
serious meditation and warmer patriotism than is usual in the works 
of the Italians. Pignotti, although his own national manner has 
been but little affected by his foreign erudition, has contributed 
more than any other to extend the influence of English letters among 
his countrymen. His works abound in allusions to them, and two 
of his principal poems are dedicated to the memory of Shakspeare 
and of Pope. 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 453 

site sensibility to beauty should have been often led to 
regard this language rather as a means of pleasure than 
of utility. We must not, however, so far yield to the 
unqualified imputation of Madame de Stael as to forget 
that they have other claims to our admiration than 
what arise from the inventions of the poet, or from 
the ideal beauties which they have revived of Grecian 
art; that the light of genius shed upon the world in 
the fourteenth, and that of learning in the fifteenth 
century, was all derived from Italy; that her writers 
first unfolded the sublimity of Christian doctrines as 
applied to modern literature, and by their patient 
philological labors restored to life the buried literature 
of antiquity; that her schools revived and expounded 
the ancient code of law, since become the basis of so 
important a branch of jurisprudence both in Europe 
and our own country; that she originated literary, and 
brought to a perfection unequalled in any other lan- 
guage, unless it be our own, civil and political, history; 
that she led the way in physical science and in that of 
political philosophy; and, finally, that of the two en- 
lightened navigators who divide the glory of adding a 
new quarter to the globe, the one was a Genoese and 
the other a Florentine. 

In following down the stream of Italian narrative 
poetry, we have wandered into so many details, es- 
pecially where they would tend to throw light on the 
intellectual character of the nation, that we have little 
room, and our readers, doubtless, less patience, left for 
a discussion of the poems which form the text of our 
article. The few stanzas descriptive of Berni, which 
we have borrowed from the Innamorato, may give some 



454 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



notion of Mr. Rose's manner. The translations have 
been noticed in several of the English journals, and we 
perfectly accord with the favorable opinion of them 
which has been so often expressed that it needs not 
here be repeated. 

The composite style of Ariosto owes its charms to 
the skill with which the delicate tints of his irony are 
mixed with the sober coloring of his narrative. His 
translators have spoiled the harmony of the composi- 
tion by overcharging one or other of these ingredients. 
Harrington has caricatured his original into burlesque; 
Hoole has degraded him into a most melancholy proser. 
The popularity of this latter version has been of infinite 
disservice to the fame of Ariosto, whose aerial fancy 
loses all its buoyancy under the heavy hexameters of 
the English translator. The purity of Mr. Rose's taste 
has prevented him from exaggerating even the beauties 
of his original. 



POETRY AND ROMANCE OF THE 
ITALIANS.* 

(July, 1831.) 

It is not our intention to go into an analysis, or even 
to discuss the merits, of the works at the head of this 
article, which we have selected only as a text for such 
reflections on the poetry and ornamental prose-writing 
of the Italians as might naturally suggest themselves to 
an English reader. The points of view from which a 
native contemplates his own literature and those from 
which it is seen by a foreigner are so dissimilar that it 
would be hardly possible that they should come pre- 
cisely to the same results without affectation or servility 
on the part of the latter. The native, indeed, is far 
better qualified than any foreigner can be to estimate 
the productions of his own countrymen ; but, as each 
is subjected to peculiar influences, truth may be more 
likely to be elicited from a collision of their mutual 
opinions than from those exclusively of either. 

* [The reader may find in this article some inadvertent repetitions 
of what had been said in two articles written some years before, and 
covering, in part, the same ground.] 

1. " Delia Letteratura Italiana, di Camillo Ugoni." 3 torn. 121110. 
Brescia, 1820. 

2. " Storia della Letteratura Italiana, del cavaliere Giuseppe 
Maffei." 3 torn. i2mo. Milano, 1825. 

3. " Storia della Letteratura Italiana nel Secolo XVI 1 1., di Anto- 
nio Lombardi." 3 torn. 8vo. Modena, 1827-29. 

(455) 



45 6 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



The Italian, although the first modern tongue to 
produce what still endure as classical models of com- 
position, was, of all the Romance dialects, the last to 
be applied to literary purposes. The poem of the Cid, 
which, with all its rawness, exhibits the frank bearing 
of the age in a highly poetic aspect, was written nearly 
a century previously to this event. The northern 
French, which even some Italian scholars of that day 
condescended to employ as the most popular vehicle 
of thought, had been richly cultivated, indemnifying 
itself in anticipation, as it were, by this extraordinary 
precocity, for the poetic sterility with which it has 
been cursed ever since. In the South, and along the 
shores of the Mediterranean, every remote corner was 
alive with the voice of song. A beautiful poetry had 
ripened into perfection there, and nearly perished, 
before the first lispings of the Italian muse were heard, 
not in her own land, but at the court of a foreigner, 
in Sicily. The poets of Lombardy wrote in the Pro- 
vencal. The histories — and almost every city had its 
historian, and some two or three — were composed in 
Latin, or in some half-formed, discordant dialect of 
the country. "The Italian of that age," says Tira- 
boschi, "more nearly resembled the Latin than the 
Tuscan does now any of her sister dialects." It 
seemed doubtful which of the conflicting idioms would 
prevail, when a mighty genius arose, who, collecting 
the scattered elements together, formed one of those 
wonderful creations which make an epoch in the his- 
tory of civilization, and forever fixed the destinies of 
his language. 

We shall not trouble our readers with a particular 



CRITICAL MISCEL LA NIBS. 



457 



criticism on so popular a work as the Divine Comedy, 
but confine ourselves to a few such desultory observa- 
tions as have been suggested on a reperusal of it. The 
Inferno is more frequently quoted and eulogized than 
any other portion of the Commedia. It exhibits a 
more marked progress of the action, and, while it 
affects us by its deepened pictures of misery, it owes, 
no doubt, something to the piquant personalities which 
have to this day not entirely lost their relish. Not- 
withstanding this, it by no means displays the whole 
of its author's intellectual power, and so very various 
are the merits of the different portions of his epic that 
one who has not read the whole may be truly said not 
to have read Dante. The poet has borrowed the hints 
for his punishments partly from ancient mythology, 
partly from the metaphorical denunciations of Scrip- 
ture, but principally from his own inexhaustible fancy; 
and he has adapted them to the specific crimes with a 
truly frightful ingenuity. We could wish that he had 
made more use of the mind as a means of torture, and 
thus given a finer moral coloring to the picture. This 
defect is particularly conspicuous in his portraiture of 
Satan, who, far different from that spirit whose form 
had not yet lost all her original brightness, is depicted 
in the gross and superstitious terrors of a childish imagi- 
nation. This decidedly bad taste must be imputed to 
the rudeness of the age in which Dante lived. The 
progress of refinement is shown in Tasso's subsequent 
portrait of this same personage, who, " towering like 
Carpe or huge Atlas," is sustained by that unconquer- 
able temper which gives life to the yet more spiritual- 
ized conceptions of Milton. The faults of Dante were 
u 39 



458 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

those of his age ; but in his elevated conceptions, in 
the wild and desolating gloom which he has thrown 
around the city of the dead, the world saw, for the 
first time, the genius of modern literature fully dis- 
played ; and in his ripe and vigorous versification it 
beheld also, for the first time, the poetical capacities 
of a modern idiom.* 

The Purgatory relies for its interest on no strong 
emotion, but on a contemplative moral tone, and on 
such luxuriant descriptions of nature as bring it much 
nearer to the style of English poetry than any other 
part of the work. It is on the Paradise, however, that 
Dante has lavished all the stores of his fancy. Yet he 
has not succeeded in his attempt to exhibit there a reg- 
ular gradation of happiness ; for happiness cannot, like 
pain, be measured by any scale of physical sensations. 
Neither is he always successful in the notions which he 
has conveyed of the occupations of the blessed. There 
was no source whence he could derive this knowledge. 
The Scriptures present no determinate idea of such 
occupations, and the mythology of the ancients had 
so little that was consolatory in it, even to themselves, 
that the shade of Achilles is made to say, in the Odys- 
sey, that "he had rather be the slave of the meanest 
living man than rule as a sovereign among the dead." 

Dante wisely placed the moral sources of happiness 
in the exercises of the mind. The most agreeable of 

* Dante anticipated the final triumph of the Italian with a generous 
confidence not shared by the more timid scholars of his own or the 
succeeding age. See his eloquent apology for it in his Convito, 
especially pp. 81, 82, torn, iv., ed. 1758. See, also, Purgatorio, canto 
xxiv. 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 45 

these to himself, though, perhaps, to few of his readers, 
was metaphysical polemics. He had, unfortunately, in 
his youth gained a prize for successful disputation at 
the schools ; and in every page of these gladiatorial 
exhibitions we discern the disciple of Scotus and Aqui- 
nas. His materiel is made up of light, music, and mo- 
tion. These he has arranged in every possible variety 
of combination. We are borne along from one mag- 
nificent fete to another, and, as we rise in the scale of 
being, the motion of the celestial dance increases in 
velocity, the light shines with redoubled brilliancy, 
and the music is of a more ravishing sweetness, until 
all is confounded in the intolerable splendors of the 
Deity. 

Dante has failed in his attempt to personify the 
Deity. Who, indeed, has not ? No such personifica- 
tion can be effected without the aid of illustration from 
physical objects ; and how degrading are these to our 
conceptions of Omnipotence ! The repeated failures 
of the Italians who have attempted this in the arts of 
design are still more conspicuous. Even the genius 
of Raphael has only furnished another proof of the 
impotence of his art. The advancement of taste may 
be again seen in Tasso's representation of the Supreme 
Being by his attributes ;* and, with similar discretion, 
Milton, like the Grecian artist who drew a mantle over 
the countenance which he could not trust himself to 
paint, whenever he has introduced the Deity has veiled 
his glories in a cloud. 

The characters and conditions of Dante and Mil- 
ton were too analogous not to have often invited the 

* Gerusalemme Liberata, c. ix., s. 56. 



460 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

parallel. Both took an active part in the revolutions 
of their age ; both lived to see the extinction of their 
own hopes and the ruin of their party ; and it was 
the fate of both to compose their immortal poems in 
poverty and disgrace. These circumstances, however, 
produced different effects on their minds. Milton, in 
solitude and darkness, from the cheerful ways of men 
cut off, was obliged to seek inwardly that celestial light 
which, as he pathetically laments, was denied to him 
from without. Hence his poem breathes a spirit of 
lofty contemplation, which is never disturbed by the 
impurities that disfigure the page of Dante. The latter 
poet, an exile in a foreign land, condemned to eat the 
bread of dependence from the hands of his ancient 
enemies, felt the iron enter more deeply into his soul, 
and, in the spirit of his age, has too often made his 
verses the vehicle of his vindictive scorn. Both stood 
forth the sturdy champions of freedom in every form, 
above all, of intellectual freedom. The same spirit 
which animates the controversial writings of Milton 
glows with yet fiercer heat in every page of the Divine 
Comedy. How does its author denounce the abuses, 
the crying abuses, of the Church, its hypocrisies and 
manifold perversions of Scripture ! How boldly does 
he declare his determination to proclaim the truth, 
that he may live in the memory of the just hereafter ! 
His Ghibelline connections were indeed unfavorable to 
these principles ; but these connections were the result 
of necessity, not of choice. His hardy spirit had been 
nursed in the last stages of the republic; and it may be 
truly said of him that he became a Ghibelline in the 
hope of again becoming a Florentine. The love of 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 461 

his native soil, as with most exiles, was a vital principle 
with him. How pathetically does he recall those good 
old times when the sons of Florence were sure to find 
a grave within her walls ! Even the bitterness of his 
heart against her, which breaks forth in the very courts 
of heaven, proves, paradoxical as it may appear, the 
tenacity of his affection. It might not be easy to 
rouse the patriotism of a modern Italian even into this 
symptom of vitality. 

The genius of both was of the severest kind. For 
this reason, any display of their sensibility, like the 
light breaking through a dark cloud, affects us the 
more by contrast. Such are the sweet pictures of 
domestic bliss in Paradise Lost, and the tender tale 
of Francesca da Rimini in the Inferno. Both are 
sublime in the highest signification of the term ; but 
Milton is an ideal poet, and delights in generalization, 
while Dante is the most literal of artists, and paints 
every thing in detail. He refuses no imagery, how- 
ever mean, that can illustrate his subject. This is too 
notorious to require exemplification. He is, moreover, 
eminently distinguished by the power of depicting his 
thought by a single vigorous touch, — a manner well 
known in Italy under the name of Dantesque. It would 
not be easy for such a verse as the following, without 
sacrifice of idiom, to be condensed within the same 
compass in our language : 

" Con viso, che tacendo dicea, taci." 

It would be interesting to trace the similarity of 
tastes in these great minds, as exhibited in their 
pleasures equally with their serious pursuits; in theii 

39" 



462 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

exquisite sensibility to music ; in their early fondness 
for those ancient romances which they have so often 
celebrated both in prose and verse ; but our limits will 
not allow us to pursue the subject farther. 

Dante's epic was greeted by his countrymen in that 
rude age with the general enthusiasm with which they 
have ever welcomed the works of genius. A chair was 
instituted at Florence for the exposition of the Divine 
Comedy, and Boccaccio was the first who filled it. The 
bust of its author was crowned with laurels ; his daugh- 
ter was maintained at the public expense ; and the fickle 
Florentines vainly solicited from Ravenna the ashes of 
their poet, whom they had so bitterly persecuted when 
living. 

Notwithstanding all this, the father of Italian verse 
has had a much less sensible influence on the taste of 
his countrymen than either of the illustrious triumvirate 
of the fourteenth century. His bold, masculine diction 
and his concentrated thought were ill suited to the 
effeminacy of his nation. One or two clumsy imitators 
of him appeared in his own age; and in ours a school 
has been formed, professing to be modelled on the 
severe principles of the trecentisti ; but no one has 
yet arisen to bend the bow of Ulysses. 

Several poets wrote in the Tuscan or Italian dialect 
at the close of the thirteenth century with tolerable 
purity ; but their amorous effusions would probably, 
like those in the Provencal, have rapidly passed into 
oblivion had the language not been consecrated by 
some established work of genius like the Divina Corn- 
media. It was fortunate that its author selected a 
subject which enabled him to exhibit the peculiar 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



463 



tendency of Christianity and of modern institutions, 
and to demonstrate their immense superiority for poet- 
ical purposes over those of antiquity. It opened a 
cheering prospect to those who doubted the capacities 
of a modern idiom ; and, after ages of barbarism, it 
was welcomed as the sign that the waters had at length 
passed from the face of the earth. 

We have been detained long upon Dante, thougli 
somewhat contrary to our intention of discussing 
classes rather than individuals, from the circumstance 
that he constitutes in himself, if we may so say, an 
entire and independent class. We shall now proceed, 
as concisely as possible, to touch upon some of the 
leading peculiarities in the lyrical poetry of the Ital- 
ians, which forms with them a very important branch 
of letters. 

Lyrical poetry is more immediately the offspring of 
imagination, or of deep feeling, than any other kind 
of verse, and there can be little chance of reaching to 
high excellence in it among a nation whose character is 
defective in these qualities. The Italians are, undoubt- 
edly, the most prolific in this department, as the French 
are the least so, of any people in Europe. Nothing 
can be more mechanical than a French ode. Reason, 
wit, pedantry, any thing but inspiration, find their way 
into it ; and when the poet is in extremity, like the 
countryman in the fable, he calls upon the pagan gods 
of antiquity to help him out. The best ode in the 
language, according to La Harpe, is that of J. B. Rous- 
seau on the Count de Luc, in which Phoebus, or the 
Fates, Pluto, Ceres, or Cybele, figure in every stanza. 
There is little of the genuine impetus sacer in all this. 






464 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

Lyrical compositions, the expression of natural sen- 
sibility, are generally most abundant in the earlier 
periods of a nation's literature. Such are the beautiful 
collections of rural minstrelsy in our own tongue, and 
the fine old ballads and songs in the Castilian ; which 
last have had the advantage over ours of being imitated 
down to a late day by their most polished writers. But 
Italy is the only country in which lyrical composition, 
from the first, instead of assuming a plebeian garb, has 
received all the perfection of literary finish, and which, 
amid every vicissitude of taste, has been cultivated by 
the most polished writers of the age. 

One cause of this is to be found in the circumstances 
and peculiar character of the father of Italian song. 
The life of Petrarch furnishes the most brilliant exam- 
ple of the triumph of letters in a country where literary 
celebrity has been often the path to political conse- 
quence. Princes and pontiffs, cities and universities, 
vied with each other in lavishing honors upon him. 
His tour through Italy was a sort of royal progress, the 
inhabitants of the cities thronging out to meet him, 
and providing a residence for him at the public expense. 

The two most enlightened capitals in Europe con- 
tended with each other for the honor of his poetical 
coronation. His influence was solicited in the princi- 
pal negotiations of the Italian States, and he enjoyed 
at the same time the confidence of the ferocious Vis- 
conti and the accomplished Robert of Naples. His 
immense correspondence connected him with the prin- 
cipal characters, both literary and political, through- 
out Europe, and his personal biography may be said 
to constitute the history of his age. 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 465 

It must be confessed that the heart of Petrarch was 
not insensible to this universal homage, and that his 
writings occasionally betray the vanity and caprice 
which indicate the spoiled child of fortune ; but, with 
this moderate alloy of humanity, his general deport- 
ment exhibits a purity of principle and a generous 
elevation of sentiment far above the degenerate politics 
of his time. He was, indeed, the first in an age of 
servility, as Dante had been the last in an age of 
freedom. If he was intimate with some of the petty 
tyrants of Lombardy, he never prostituted his genius 
to the vindication of their vices. His political nego- 
tiations were conducted with the most generous and 
extended views for the weal of all Italy. How inde- 
pendently did he remonstrate with Dandolo on his war 
with the Genoese ! How did he lift his voice against 
the lawless banditti who, as foreign mercenaries, rav- 
aged the fair plains of Lombardy ! How boldly, to 
a degree which makes it difficult to account for his 
personal safety, did he thunder his invectives against 
the western Babylon ! 

Even his failings were those of a generous nature. 
Dwelling much of his time at a distance from his native 
land, he considered himself rather as a citizen of Italy 
than of any particular district of it. He contemplated 
her with the eye of an ancient Roman, and wished to 
see the Imperial City once more resume her supremacy 
among the nations. This led him for a moment to 
give in to the brilliant illusion of liberty which Rienzi 
awakened. "Who would not," he says, appealing to 
the Romans, "rather die a freeman than live a slave?"* 

* Epist. ad Nic. Laurentii : Opera, p. 535. 
u* 



466 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

But when he saw that he had been deceived, he did not 
attempt to conceal his indignation, and, in an animated 
expostulation with the tribune, he admonishes him that 
he is the minister, not the master, of the republic, 
and that treachery to one's country is a crime which 
nothing can expiate.* 

As he wandered amid the ruins of Rome, he con- 
templated with horror the violation of her venerable edi- 
fices, and he called upon the pontiffs to return to the 
protection of their "widowed metropolis." He was, 
above all, solicitous for the recovery of the intellectual 
treasures of antiquity, sparing no expense or personal 
fatigue in this cause. Many of the mouldering manu- 
scripts he restored or copied with his own hand ; and 
his beautiful transcript of the epistles of Cicero is still 
to be seen in the Laurentian Library at Florence. 

The influence of his example is visible in the generous 
emulation for letters kindled throughout Italy, and in 
the purer principles of taste which directed the studies 
of the schools. f His extensive correspondence diffused 
to the remotest corners of Europe the sacred flame which 
glowed so brightly in his own bosom ; and it may be 
truly said that he possessed an intellectual empire such 
as was never before enjoyed, and probably never can 
be again, in the comparatively high state of civilization 
to which the world is arrived. 

* Famil. Epist., lib. vii. ep. 7, p. 677, Basil ed. 

t In Florence, for example, with a population which Villani, at the 
middle of the fourteenth century, reckons at ninety thousand souls, 
there were from eight to ten thousand children who received a liberal 
education (Istor. Fiorent., lib. xi. cap. 93), at a time when the higher 
classes in the rest of Europe were often uninstructed in the ele- 
mentary principles of knowledge. 






CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 467 

It is not, however, the antiquarian researches of 
Petrarch, nor those elaborate Latin compositions which 
secured to him the laurel wreath of poetry in the capi- 
tol, that have kept his memory still green in the hearts 
of his countrymen, but those humbler effusions in his 
own language, which he did not even condescend to 
mention in his Letter to Posterity, and which he freely 
gave away as alms to ballad-singers. It was auspicious 
for Italian literature that a poet like Dante should have 
been followed by one of so flexible a character as Pe- 
trarch. It was beauty succeeding vigor. The language 
to which Dante had given all its compactness and energy 
was far from having reached the full harmony of numbers 
of which it was capable. He had, moreover, occasion- 
ally distorted it into such Latinized inversions, uncouth 
phrases, Hebraisms and Grecisms, as were foreign to 
the genius of the tongue. These blemishes, of so little 
account in Dante's extensive poem, would have been 
fatal to the lyrical pieces of Petrarch, which, like mini- 
atures, from their minuteness, demand the highest finish 
of detail. The pains which the latter poet bestowed on 
the correction of his verses are almost inconceivable. 
Some of them would appear, from the memoranda which 
he has left, to have been submitted to the file for weeks, 
nay, months, before he dismissed them. Nor was this 
fastidiousness of taste frivolous in one who was correct- 
ing not for himself but for posterity, and who, in these 
peculiar graces of style, was creating beautiful and per- 
. manent forms of expression for his countrymen. His 
acquaintance with the modern dialects, especially the 
Spanish and the Provencal, enriched his vocabulary 
with many exotic beauties. His fine ear disposed him 



468 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

to refuse all but the most harmonious combinations of 
sound. He was accustomed to try the melody of his 
verses by the lute, and, like the fabled Theban, built 
up his elegant fabric by the charms of music. By these 
means he created a style scarcely more antiquated than 
that of the present day, and which can hardly be said 
to contain an obsolete phrase ; an assertion not to be 
ventured respecting any author in our language before 
the days of Queen Anne. Indeed, even a foreigner 
can hardly open a page of Petrarch without being struck 
with the precocity of a language which, like the vege- 
tation of an arctic summer, seems to have ripened into 
full maturity at once. There is nothing analogous to 
this in any other tongue with which we are acquainted, 
unless it be the Greek, which, in the poems of Homer, 
appears to have attained its last perfection ; a circum- 
stance which has led Cicero to remark, in his Brutus, 
that " there must, doubtless, have existed poets ante- 
cedent to Homer, since invention and perfection can 
hardly go together. ' ' 

The mass of Petrarch's Italian poetry is, as is well 
known, of an amorous complexion. He was naturally 
of a melancholy temperament, and his unfortunate 
passion became with him the animating principle of 
being. His compositions in the Latin, as well as those 
in the vulgar tongue, his voluminous correspondence, 
his private memoranda or confessions, which, from their 
nature, seem never to have been destined for the public 
eye, all exhibit this passion in one shape or another. 
Yet there have been those who have affected to doubt 
even the existence of such a personage as Laura. 

His Sonnets and Canzoni, chronologically arranged, 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 469 

exhibit pretty fairly the progress of his life and love, 
and, as such, have been judiciously used by the Abbe 
de Sade. The most trivial event seems to have stirred 
the poetic feeling within him. We find no less than 
four sonnets indited to his mistress's gloves, and three 
to her eyes ; which last, styled, par excellence, "The 
Three Sisters," are in the greatest repute with his coun- 
trymen, — a judgment on which most English critics 
would be at issue with them. Notwithstanding the 
vicious affectation of style and the mysticism which 
occasionally obscure these and other pieces of Petrarch, 
his general tone exhibits a moral dignity unknown to 
the sordid appetites of the ancients, and an earnestness 
of passion rarely reflected from the cold glitter of the 
Provencal. But it is in the verses written after the 
death of his mistress that he confesses the inspiration 
of Christianity, in the deep moral coloring which he 
has given to his descriptions of nature, and in those 
visions of immortal happiness which he contrasts with 
the sad realities of the present life. He dwells rather 
on the melancholy pleasures of retrospection than those 
of hope ; unlike most of the poets of Italy, whose warm, 
sunny skies seem to have scattered the gloom which 
hangs over the poetry of the North. In this and some 
other peculiarities, Dante and Petrarch appear to have 
borne greater resemblance to the English than to their 
own nation. 

Petrarch's career, however brilliant, may serve rather 
as a warning than as a model. The querulous tone of 
some of his later writings, the shade of real sorrow 
which seems to come across even his brightest mo- 
ments, show the utter inefflcacy of genius and of 

40 



47 o BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

worldly glory to procure to their possessor a substantial 
happiness. It is melancholy to witness the aberrations 
of mind into which so fine a genius was led by unfor- 
tunate passion. The apparition of Laura haunted him 
by night as well as by day, in society and in solitude. 
He sought to divert his mind by travelling, by political 
or literary occupation, by reason and religion ; but in 
vain. His^letters and private confessions show, no less 
than his poetry, how incessantly his imagination was 
tortured by doubts, hopes, fears, melancholy presages, 
regrets, and despair. She triumphed over the decay 
of her personal charms, and even over the grave, for 
it was a being of the mind he worshipped. There 
is something affecting in seeing such a mind as Pe- 
trarch's feeding on this unrequited passion, and more 
than twenty years after his mistress's death, and when 
on the verge of the grave himself, depicting her in all 
the bright coloring of youthful fancy, and following 
her in anticipation to that heaven where he hopes 
soon to be united to her. 

Petrarch's example, even in his own day, was widely 
infectious. He sarcastically complains of the quanti- 
ties of verses sent to him for correction, from the far- 
thest north, from Germany and the British Isles, then 
the Ultima Thule of civilization. The pedants of the 
succeeding age, it is true, wasted their efforts in hope- 
less experiments upon the ancient languages, whose 
chilling influence seems to have entirely closed the 
hand of the native minstrel ; and it was not until the 
time of Lorenzo de' Medici, whose correct taste led 
him to prefer the flexible movements of a living tongue, 
that the sweet tones of the Italian lyre were again 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



471 



awakened. The excitement, however, soon became 
general, affecting all ranks, from the purpled prelate 
down to the most humble artisan ; and a collection of 
the Beauties (as we should call them) of this latter 
description of worthies has been gathered into a re- 
spectable volume, which Baretti assures us, with a 
good-natured criticism, may be compared with the 
verses of Petrarch. In all these the burden of the 
song is love. Those who did not feel could at least 
affect the tender passion. Lorenzo de' Medici pitched 
upon a mistress as deliberately as Don Quixote did on 
his Dulcinea ; and Tasso sighed away his soul to a 
nymph so shadowy as sorely to have puzzled his com- 
mentators till the time of Serassi. 

It would be unavailing to attempt to characterize 
those who have followed in the footsteps of the Lau- 
reate, or we might dwell on the romantic sweetness of 
Lorenzo de' Medici, the purity of Vittoria Colonna, 
the elaborate polish of Bembo, the vivacity of Marini, 
and the eloquence, the Platonic reveries, and rich 
coloring of Tasso, whose beauties and whose defects 
so nearly resemble those of his great original in this 
department. But we have no leisure to go minutely 
into the shades of difference between the imitators of 
Petrarch. One may regret that, amid their clouds of 
amorous incense, he can so rarely discern the religious 
or patriotic enthusiasm which animates the similar 
compositions of the Spanish poets, and which forms 
the noblest basis of lyrical poetry at all times. The 
wrongs of Italy, the common battle-field of the ban- 
ditti of Europe for nearly a century, and at the very 
time when her poetic vein flowed most freely, might 



472 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



well have roused the indignation of her children. The 
comparatively few specimens on this theme from Pe- 
trarch to Filicaja are justly regarded as the happiest 
efforts of the Italian lyre. 

The seventeenth century, so unfortunate for the 
national literature in all other respects, was marked 
by a bolder deviation from the eternal track of the 
Petrarchists ; a reform, indeed, which may be traced 
back to Casa. Among these innovators, Chiabrera, 
whom Tiraboschi styles both Anacreon and Pindar, 
but who may be content with the former of these ap- 
pellations, and Filicaja, who has found in the Christian 
faith sources of a sublimity that Pindar could never 
reach, are the most conspicuous. Their salutary ex- 
ample has not been lost on the modern Italian writers. 

Some of the ancients have made a distinct division 
of lyrical poetry, under the title of melicus* If, as it 
would seem, they mean something of a more calm and 
uniform tenor than the impetuous dithyrambic flow, 
something in which symmetry of form and melody of 
versification are chiefly considered, in which, in fine, 
the effeminate beauties of sentiment are preferred to 
the more hardy conceptions of fancy, the term may be 
significant of the great mass of Italian lyrics. But we 
fear that we have insisted too far on their defects. Our 
criticism has been formed rather on the average than 
on the highest specimens of the art. In this way the 
very luxuriance of the soil is a disadvantage to it. The 
sins of exuberance, however, are much more corrigible 
than those of sterility, which fall upon this depart- 
ment of poetry in almost every other nation. We must 

* Ausonius, Edyl. IV., 54. — Cicero, De Opt. Gen. Oratorum, i. 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 473 

remember, too, that no people has exhibited the pas- 
sion of love under such a variety of beautiful aspects, 
and that, after all, although the amount be compara- 
tively small, no other modern nation can probably 
produce so many examples of the very highest lyrical 
inspiration. 

But it is time that we should return to the Romantic 
Epics, the most important and, perhaps, the most pro- 
lific branch of the ornamental literature of the Italians. 
They have been distributed into a great variety of 
classes by their own critics. We shall confine our re- 
marks to some of their most eminent models, without 
regard to their classification. 

Those who expect to find in these poems the same 
temper which animates the old English tales of chiv- 
alry will be disappointed. A much more correct no- 
tion of their manner may be formed from Mr. Ellis's 
B ernes que (if we may be allowed a significant term) 
recapitulations of these latter. In short, they are the 
marvels of an heroic age, told with the fine incredulous 
air of a polite one. It is this contrast of the dignity 
of the matter with the familiarity of the manner of 
narration that has occasioned among their country- 
men so many animated disputes respecting the serious 
or satirical intentions of Pulci, Ariosto, Berni, and the 
rest. 

The Italians, although they have brought tales of 
chivalry to higher perfection than any other people in 
the world, are, of all others, in their character the most 
anti-chivalrous. Their early republican institutions, 
which brought all classes nearly to the same level, were 
obviously unfavorable to the spirit of chivalry. Com- 

40* 



474 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

merce became the road to preferment. Wealth was 
their pedigree, and their patent of nobility. The mag- 
nificent Medici were bankers and merchants ; and the 
ancient aristocracy of Venice employed their capital 
in traffic until an advanced period of the republic. 
Courage, so essential in the character of a knight, was 
of little account in the busy communities of Italy. Like 
Carthage of old, they trusted their defence to mer- 
cenaries, first foreign, and afterwards native, but who 
in every instance fought for hire, not honor, selling 
themselves, and often their employers, to the highest 
bidder ; and who, cased in impenetrable mail, fought 
with so little personal hazard that Machiavelli has re- 
lated more than one infamous encounter in which the 
only lives lost were from suffocation under their pon- 
derous panoplies. So low had the military reputation 
of the Italians declined, that in the war of the Nea- 
politan succession in 1502 it was thought necessary for 
thirteen of their body to vindicate the national char- 
acter from the imputation of cowardice by solemn de- 
fiance and battle against an equal number of French 
knights, in presence of the hostile armies. 

Hence other arts came to be studied than that of 
war, — the arts of diplomacy and intrigue. Hence 
statesmen were formed, but not soldiers. The cam- 
paign was fought in the cabinet instead of the field. 
Every spring of cunning and corruption was essayed, 
and an insidious policy came into vogue, in which, as 
the philosopher who has digested its principles into a 
system informs us, " the failure, not the atrocity of 
a deed, was considered disgraceful."* The law of 

* Machiavelli, Istor. Fior., 1. vi. 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



475 



honor became different with the Italians from what 
it was with other nations. Conspiracy was preferred 
to open defiance, and assassination was a legitimate 
method of revenge. The State of Venice condescended 
to employ a secret agent against the life of Francis 
Sforza ; and the noblest escutcheons in Italy, those of 
Este and the Medici, were stained with the crimes of 
fratricide and incest. 

In this general moral turpitude, the literature of 
Italy was rapidly rising to its highest perfection. There 
was scarcely a petty state which, in the fourteenth, fif- 
teenth, and beginning of the sixteenth centuries, had 
not made brilliant advances in elegant prose, poetry, 
or the arts of design. Intellectual culture was widely 
diffused, and men of the highest rank devoted them- 
selves with eagerness to the occupation of letters; this, 
too, at a time when learning in other countries was 
banished to colleges and cloisters; when books were 
not always essential in the education of a gentleman. 
Du Guesclin, the flower of French chivalry in the four- 
teenth century, could not read a word. Castiglione, 
in his Cortegiano, has given us so pleasing a picture 
of the recreations of the little court of Urbino, one 
of the many into which Italy was distributed at the 
close of the fifteenth century, as to suggest an exalted 
notion of its taste and cultivated habits ; and Guicciar- 
dini has described, with all the eloquence of regret, 
the flourishing condition of his country at the same 
period, ere the srorm had descended on her beautiful 
valleys. In all this we see the characteristics of a 
highly-polished state of society, but none of the hardy 
virtues of chivalry. 



476 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

It was precisely in such a state of society, light, 
lively, and licentious, possessed of a high relish for the 
beauties of imagination, but without moral dignity or 
even a just moral sense, that the Muse of romance first 
appeared in Italy ; and it was not to be expected that 
she would retain there her majestic Castilian port, or 
the frank, cordial bearing which endeared her to our 
Norman ancestors. In fact, the Italian fancy seems to 
have caught rather the gay, gossiping temper of the 
fabliaux. The most familiar and grotesque adventures 
are mixed in with the most serious, and even these last 
are related in a fine tone of ironical pleasantry. Mag- 
nificent inventions are recommended by agreeable illu- 
sions of style; but they not unfrequently furnish a 
flimsy drapery for impurity of sentiment. The high 
devotion and general moral aspect of our English 
Faerie Queene are not characteristic, with a few emi- 
nent exceptions, of Italian tales of chivalry, in which 
we too often find the best interests of our nature ex- 
posed to all the license of frivolous banter. Pulci, who 
has furnished an apology for the infamous Pucelle,* and 
Fortiguerra, with their school of imitators, may afford 
abundant examples to the curious in these matters. 

The first successful models of the romantic epic 
were exhibited at the table of Lorenzo de' Medici, 
that remarkable man, who, as Machiavelli says of 
him, "seemed to unite in his person two distinct na- 
tures," — who could pass from the severe duties of the 

* See Voltaire's preface to it. Chapelain's prosy poem on the 
same subject, La Pucelle d'Orleans, lives now only in the satire of 
Boileau. It was the hard fate of the Heroine of Orleans to be 
canonized in a dull epic and damned in a witty one. 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



All 



council-chamber to mingle in the dances of the people, 
and from the abstractions of his favorite philosophy to 
the broad merriment of a convivial table. Amid all 
the elegance of the Medici, however, — of Lorenzo and 
Leo X. , — there seems to have been a lurking appetite 
for vulgar pleasure, at least if we may judge from the 
coarse, satirical repartee which Franco and his friend 
Pulci poured out upon one another for the entertain- 
ment of their patron, and the still more bald buf- 
foonery which enlightened the palace of his pontifical 
son. 

The Stanze of Politian, however, exhibit no trace 
of this obliquity of taste. This fragment of an epic, 
almost too brief for criticism, like a prelude to some 
beautiful air, seems to have opened the way to those 
delightful creations of the Muse which so rapidly fol- 
lowed, and to have contained within itself their various 
elements of beauty, — the invention of Boiardo, the 
picturesque narrative of Ariosto, and Tasso's flush of 
color. Every stanza is music to the ear, and affords 
a distinct picture to the eye. Unfortunately, Politian 
was soon seduced by the fashion of the age from the 
culture of his native tongue. Probably no Italian poet 
of equal promise was ever sacrificed to the manes of 
antiquity. His voluminous Latin labors are now for- 
gotten, and this fragment of an epic affords almost 
the only point from which he is still contemplated by 
posterity. 

Pulci's Morgante is the first thorough-bred romance 
of chivalry which the Italians have received as text 
of the tongue. It is fashioned much more literally than 
any of its successors on Turpin's Chronicle, that gross 






478 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

medley of fact and fable, too barren for romance, too 
false for history; the dunghill from which have shot 
up, nevertheless, the bright flowers of French and Ital- 
ian fiction. In like manner as in this, religion, not 
love, is the principle of Pulci's action. The theo- 
logical talk of his devils may remind one of the prosy 
conference of Roland and Ferracute ; and, strange to 
say, he is the only one of the eminent Italian poets 
who has adopted from the chronicle the celebrated 
rout at Roncesvalles. In his concluding cantos, which 
those who have censured him as a purely satirical or 
burlesque poet can have hardly reached, Pulci, throw- 
ing off the vulgar trammels which seem to have op- 
pressed his genius, rises into the noblest conceptions 
of poetry, and describes the tragical catastrophe with 
all the eloquence of pathos and moral grandeur. Had 
he written often thus, the Morgan te would now be re- 
sorted to by native purists, not merely as the well of 
Tuscan undefiled, but as the genuine fount of epic 
inspiration. 

From the rank and military profession of Boiardo, 
it might be expected that his poem, the Orlando Inna- 
morato, would display more of the lofty tone of chiv- 
alry than is usual with his countrymen ; but, with some 
exceptions, the portrait of Ruggiero, for example, it 
will be difficult to discern this. He, however, excels 
them all in a certain force of characterizing, and in an 
inexhaustible fertility of invention. His dramatis per- 
sonce, continued by Ariosto, might afford an excellent 
subject for a parallel, which we have not room to dis- 
cuss. In general, he may be said to sculpture where 
Ariosto paints. His heroes assume a fiercer and more 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



479 



indomitable aspect, and his Amazonian females a more 
glaring and less fastidious coquetry. But it is in the 
regions of pure fancy that his muse delights to sport, 
where, instead of the cold conceptions of a Northern 
brain, which make up the machinery of Pulci, we are 
introduced to the delicate fairies of the East, to gar- 
dens blooming in the midst of the desert, to palaces 
of crystal, winged steeds, enchanted armor, and all 
the gay fabric of Oriental mythology. It has been 
the singular fate of Boiardo to have had his story con- 
tinued and excelled by one poet, and his style reformed 
by another, until his own original work, and even his 
name, have passed into comparative oblivion. Berni's 
rifacimento is perhaps the most remarkable instance of 
the triumph of style on record. Every stanza reflects 
the sense of the original j yet such is the fascination 
of his diction, compared with the provincial barbarism 
of his predecessor, as to remind one of those mutations 
in romance where some old and withered hag is sud- 
denly transformed into a blooming fairy. It may be 
doubted whether this could have succeeded so com- 
pletely in a language where the beauties of style are 
less appreciated. Dryden has made a similar attempt 
in the Canterbury Tales ; but who does not prefer the 
racy, romantic sweetness of Chaucer? 

The Orlando Furioso, from its superior literary exe- 
cution, as well as from its union of all the peculiarities 
of Italian tales of chivalry, may be taken as the repre- 
sentative of the whole species. Some of the national 
critics have condemned, and some have endeavored 
to justify, these peculiarities of the romantic epopee, — 
its complicated narrative and provoking interruptions, 



480 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

its transitions from the gravest to the most familiar 
topics, its lawless extravagance of fiction, and other 
deviations from the statutes of antiquity, — but very 
few have attempted to explain them on just and philo- 
sophical principles. The romantic eccentricities of 
the Italian poets are not to be imputed either to in- 
attention or ignorance. Most of them were accom- 
plished scholars, and went to their work with all the 
forecast of consummate artists. Boiardo was so well 
versed in the ancient tongues as to have made accurate 
translations of Herodotus and Apuleius. Ariosto was 
such an elegant Latinist that even the classic Bembo 
did not disdain to learn from him the mysteries of 
Horace. He consulted his friends over and over again 
on the disposition of his fable, assigning to them the 
most sufficient reasons for its complicated texture. In 
like manner, Tasso shows, in his Poetical Discourses, 
how deeply he had revolved the principles of his art, 
and his Letters prove his dexterity in the application 
of these principles to his own compositions. These il- 
lustrious minds understood well the difference between 
copying the ancients and copying nature. They knew 
that to write by the rules of the former is not to write 
like them ; that the genius of our institutions requires 
new and peculiar forms of expression ; that nothing is 
more fantastic than a modern antique ; and they wisely 
left the attempt and the failure to such spiritless ped- 
ants as Trissino. 

The difference subsisting between the ancients and 
moderns, in the constitution of society, amply justifies 
the different principles on which they have proceeded 
in their works of imagination. Religion, love, honor, 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 481 

— what different ideas are conveyed by these terms in 
these different periods of history !* The love of coun- 
try was the pervading feeling which, in the ancient 
Greek or Roman, seems to have absorbed every other, 
and to have obliterated, as it were, the moral idiosyn- 
crasy of the individual, while with the moderns it is 
the individual who stands forward in principal relief. 
His loves, his private feuds and personal adventures, 
form the object almost of exclusive attention. Hence, 
in the classical fable strict unity of action and con- 
centration of interest are demanded, while in the ro- 
mantic the object is best attained by variety of action 
and diversity of interest, and the threads of personal 
adventure separately conducted, and perpetually inter- 
secting each other, make up the complicated texture 
of the fable. Hence it becomes so exceedingly difficult 
to discern who is the real hero, and what the main 
action, in such poems as the Innamorato and Furioso. 
Hence, too, the episode, the accident, if we may so 
say, of the classical epic, becomes the essence of the 
romantic. On this explication, Tasso's delightful ex- 
cursions, his adventures of Sophronia and Erminia, so 
often condemned as excrescences, may be admired as 
perfectly legitimate beauties. 

The poems of Homer were intended as historical 
compositions. They were revered and quoted as such 
by the most circumspect of the national writers, as 

* How feeble, as an operative principle, must religion have been 
among people who openly avowed it to be the creation of their 
own poets! "Homer and Hesiod," says Herodotus, " created the 
theogony of the Greeks, assigning to the gods their various titles, 
characters, and forms." (Herod., ii. 63.) Religion, it is well known, 
was a principal basis of modern chivalry. 
v 41 



482 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

Thucydides and Strabo, for example. The romantic 
poets, on the other hand, seem to have intended 
nothing beyond a mere delasseme7it of the imagina- 
tion. The old Norman epics, it is true, exhibit a 
wonderful coincidence in their delineations of man- 
ners with the contemporary chronicles. But this is 
not the spirit of Italian romance, which has rarely had 
any higher ostensible aim than that of pure amusement, 

" Scritta cosi come la penna getta, 
Per fuggir l'ozio, e non per cercar gloria," 

and which was right, therefore, in seeking its materials 
in the wildest extravagances of fiction, the magnanime 
menzogne of chivalry, and the brilliant chimeras of the 
East. 

The immortal epics of Ariosto and Tasso are too 
generally known to require from us any particular 
analysis. Some light, however, may be reflected on 
these poets from a contrast of their peculiarities. The 
period in which Tasso wrote was one of high religious 
fermentation. The Turks, who had so long overawed 
Europe, had recently been discomfited in the memor- 
able sea-fight of Lepanto, and the kindling enthusiasm 
of the nations seemed to threaten for a moment to re- 
vive the follies of the Crusades. Tasso's character was 
of a kind to be peculiarly sensible to these influences. 
His soul was penetrated with religious fervor, to which, 
as Serassi has shown, more than to any cause of mys- 
terious passion, are to be imputed his occasional mental 
aberrations. He was distinguished, moreover, by his 
chivalrous personal valor, put to the test in more than 
one hazardous encounter; and he was reckoned the 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 483 

most expert swordsman of his time. Tasso's peculiari- 
ties of character were singularly suited to his subject. 
He has availed himself of this to the full in exhibiting 
the resources and triumphs of Christian chivalry. The 
intellectual rather than the physical attributes of his 
supernatural agents, his solemn meditations on the fra- 
gility of earthly glory, and the noble ardor with which 
he leads us to aspire after an imperishable crown, give 
to his epic a moral grandeur which no preceding poet 
had ever reached. It has been objected to him, how- 
ever, that he preferred the intervention of subordi- 
nate agents to that of the Deity; but the God of the 
Christians cannot be introduced like those of pagan 
mythology. They espoused the opposite sides of the 
contest; but wherever He appears the balance is no 
longer suspended, and the poetical interest is conse- 
quently destroyed. 

" Victrix causa Diis placuit, sed victa Catoni." 

This might be sublime with the ancients, but would be 
blasphemous and absurd with the moderns ; and Tasso 
judged wisely in availing himself of inferior and inter- 
mediate ministers. 

Ariosto's various subject — 

" Le donne, i cavalier', l'arme, gli amori" — 

was equally well suited with Tasso's to his own various 
and flexible genius. It did not, indeed, admit of the 
same moral elevation, in which he was himself perhaps 
deficient, but it embraced within its range every va- 
riety of human passion and portraiture. Tasso was of 
a solitary, as Ariosto was of a social temper. He had 



484 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

no acquaintance with affairs, and Gravina accuses him 
of drawing his knowledge from books instead of men. 
He turned his thoughts inward, and matured them by 
deep and serious meditation. He had none of the 
volatile talents of his rival, who seems to have parted 
with his brilliant fancies as readily as the tree gives up 
its leaves in autumn. Ariosto was a man of the world, 
and in his philosophy may be styled an Epicurean. 
His satires show a familiarity with the practical con- 
cerns of life, and a deep insight into the characters of 
men. His conceptions, however, were of the earth ; 
and his pure style, which may be compared with Al- 
cina's transparent drapery, too often reveals to us the 
grossest impurity of thought. 

The muse of Tasso was of a heavenly nature, and 
nourished herself with celestial visions and ideal forms 
of beauty. He was a disciple of Plato, and hence the 
source of his general elevation of thought, and, too 
often, of his mystical abstraction. The healthful bloom 
of his language imparts an inexpressible charm to the 
purity of his sentiments, and it is truly astonishing that 
so chaste and dignified a composition should have been 
produced in an age and court so corrupt. 

Both of these great artists elaborated their style with 
the utmost care, but with totally different results. This 
frequently gave to Tasso' s verse the finish of a lyrical, 
or, rather, of a musical composition; for many of his 
stanzas have less resemblance to the magnificent rhythm 
of Petrarch than to the melodious monotony of Metas- 
tasio. This must be considered a violation of the true 
epic style. It is singular that Tasso himself, in one of 
his poetical criticisms, should have objected this very 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 485 

defect to his rival.* The elaboration of Ariosto, on 
the other hand, resulted in that exquisite negligence, 
or, rather, artlessness of expression, so easy in appear- 
ance, but so difficult in reality to be imitated : 

" Facil' versi che costan tanta pena." 

The Jerusalem Delivered is placed, by the nice dis- 
crimination of the Italian critics, at the head of .their 
heroic epics. In its essence, however, it is strictly 
romantic, though in its form it is accommodated to 
the general proportions of the antique. In Ariosto's 
complicated fable it is difficult to discern either a 
leading hero or a predominant action. Sismondi ap- 
plauds Ginguene for having discovered this hero in 
Ruggiero. But, both those writers might have found 
this discovery, where it was revealed more than two 
centuries ago, in Tasso's own Discourses. f We doubt, 
however, its accuracy, and cannot but think that the 
prominent part assigned to Orlando, from whom the 
poem derives its name, manifests a different intention 
in the author. 

The stately and imposing beauties of Tasso's epic 
have rendered it generally the most acceptable to for- 
eigners, while the volatile graces of Ariosto have made 
him most popular with his own nation. Both poets 
have had the rare felicity not only of obtaining the 
applause of the learned, but of circulating among the 
humblest classes of their countrymen. Fragments of 
the Furioso are still recited by the lazzaroni of Naples, 
as those of the Jerusalem once were by the gondoliers 
of Venice, where this beautiful epic, broken up into 

* Discorsi Poetici, iii. | Ibid., ii. 

41* 



4&6 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

ballads, might be heard for miles along the canals on 
a tranquil summer evening. Had Boileau, who so bit- 
terly sneers at the clinquant of Tasso, "heard these 
musical contests," says Voltaire, "he would have had 
nothing to say." It is worthy of remark that these 
two celebrated poems, together with the Aminta, the 
Pastor Fido, and the Secchia Rapita, were all produced 
within the brief compass of a century, in the petty 
principality of the house of Este, which thus seemed 
to indemnify itself for its scanty territory by its ample 
acquisitions in the intellectual world. 

The mass of epical imitations in Italy, both of Ari- 
osto and Tasso, especially the former, is perfectly over- 
whelming. Nor is it easy to understand the patience 
with which the Italians have resigned themselves to 
these interminable poems of seventy, eighty, or even 
ninety thousand verses each. Many of them, it must 
be admitted, are the work of men of real genius, and, 
in a literature less fruitful in epic excellence, would 
have given a wide celebrity to their authors ; and the 
amount of others of less note, in a department so 
rarely attempted in other countries, shows in the nation 
at large a wonderful fecundity of fancy. 

The Italians, desirous of combining as many attrac- 
tions as possible, and extremely sensible to harmony, 
have not, as has been the case in France and England, 
divested their romances of the music of verse. They 
have rarely adopted a national subject for their story, 
but have condescended to borrow those of the old 
Norman minstrels; and, in conformity with the char- 
acteristic temperament of the nation, they have almost 
always preferred the mercurial temper of the court of 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 487 

Charlemagne to the more sober complexion of the 
Round Table.* 

With a few exceptions, the romantic poets, since the 
time of Ariosto, appear to have gained as little in ele- 
vation of sentiment as in national feeling. The nice 
classification of their critics seems to relate only to 
their varieties of comic character, and, as we descend 
to a later period, the fine, equivocal raillery of the 
older romances degenerates into a broad and undis- 
guised burlesque. In the latter class, the Ricciardetto 
of Fortiguerra is a jest rather than a satire upon tales 
of chivalry. The singular union which this work ex- 
hibits of elegance of style and homeliness of subject 
may have furnished, especially in its introduction, the 
model of that species of poetry which Lord Byron has 
familiarized us with in Don Juan, where the contrast 
of sentiment and satire, of vivid passion and chill 
misanthropy, of images of beauty and splenetic sar- 
casm, may remind one of the whimsical combinations 
in Alpine scenery, where the strawberry blooms on the 
verge of a snow-wreath. 

The Italians claim to have given the first models 
of mock-heroic poetry in modern times. The Secchia 
Rapita of Tassoni has the merit of a graceful versifica- 
tion, exhibiting many exquisite pictures of voluptuous 
repose, and some passages of an imposing grandeur. 
But these accord ill with the vulgar merriment and 
general burlesque tone of the piece, which, on the 
whole, presents a strange medley of beauties and blem- 

* The French antiquary Tressan furnishes an exception to the gen- 
eral criticism of his countrymen, in admitting the superiority of this 
latter class of romances over those of Charlemagne. 



488 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

ishes mixed up promiscuously together. Twelve cantos 
of hard fighting and cutting of throats are far too 
serious for a joke. The bloodless battle of the books 
in the Lutrin, or those of the pot-valiant heroes of 
Knickerbocker, are in much better keeping. The 
Italians have no poetry of a mezzo carattere like our 
Rape of the Lock,* where a fine atmosphere of irony 
pervades the piece and gives life to every character in 
it. They appear to delight in that kind of travesty 
which reduces great things into little, but which is of a 
much less spiritual nature than that which exalts little 
things into great. Parini's exquisite Giorno, if the 
satire had not rather too sharp an edge, might furnish 
an exception to both these remarks. 

But it is time that we should turn to the Novelle, 
those delightful "tales of pleasantry and love," which 
form one of the most copious departments of the na- 
tional literature. And here we may remark two pecu- 
liarities : first, that similar tales in France and England 
fell entirely into neglect after the fifteenth century, 
while in Italy they have been cultivated with the most 
unwearied assiduity from their earliest appearance to 
the present hour ; secondly, that in both the former 
countries the fabliaux were almost universally exhib- 
ited in a poetical dress, while in Italy, contrary to the 
popular taste on all other occasions, they have been as 
uniformly exhibited in prose. These peculiarities are 
undoubtedly to be imputed to the influence of Boc- 
caccio, whose transcendent genius gave a permanent 
popularity to this kind of composition, and finally 
determined the forms of elegant prose with his nation. 

* Pignotti, Storia della Toscana, torn. x. p. 132. 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



489 



The appearance of the Decameron is, in some points 
of view, as remarkable a phenomenon as that of the 
Divine Comedy. It furnishes the only example on 
record of the almost simultaneous development of 
prose and poetry in the literature of a nation. The 
earliest prose of any pretended literary value in the 
Greek tongue, the most precocious of any of an- 
tiquity, must be placed near four centuries after the 
poems of Homer. To descend to modern times, 
the Spaniards have a little work, "El Conde Luca- 
nor," nearly contemporary with the Decameron, writ- 
ten on somewhat of a similar plan, but far more 
didactic in its purport. Its style, though marked by 
a certain freshness and naivete, the healthy beauties 
of an infant dialect, has nothing of a classical finish ; 
to which, indeed, Castilian prose, notwithstanding its 
fine old chronicles and romances, can make no pre- 
tension before the close of the fifteenth century. In 
France a still later period must be assigned for this 
perfection. Dante, it is true, speaks of the peculiar 
suitableness of the French language in his day for 
prose narration, on account of its flexibility and free- 
dom ;* but Dante had few and very inadequate stand- 
ards of comparison, and experience has shown how 
many ages of purification it was to undergo before 
it could become the vehicle of elegant composition. 
Pascal's Provincial Letters furnish, in the opinion of 
the national critics, the earliest specimen of good 
prose. It would be more difficult to agree upon the 
author or the period that arrested the fleeting forms 
of expression in our own language ; but we certainly 

* De Vulgari Eloquio, lib. i. ( cap. x. 
v* 



49° 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



could not venture upon an earlier date than the con- 
clusion of the seventeenth century. 

The style of the Decameron exhibits the full ma- 
turity of an Augustan age. The finish of its periods, 
its long, Latinized involutions, but especially its redun- 
dancy and Asiatic luxury of expression, vices imputed 
to Cicero by his own contemporaries, as Quintilian in- 
forms us, reveal to us the model on which Boccaccio 
diligently formed himself. In the more elevated parts 
of his subject he reaches to an eloquence not unworthy 
of the Roman orator himself. The introductions to 
his novels, chiefly descriptive, are adorned with all the 
music and the coloring of poetry; much too poetic, 
indeed, for the prose of any other tongue. It cannot 
be doubted that this brilliant piece of mechanism has 
had an immense influence on the Italians, both in se- 
ducing them into a too exclusive attention to mere 
beauties of style, and in leading them to solicit such 
beauties in graver and less appropriate subjects than 
those of pure invention. 

In the celebrated description of the Plague, how- 
ever, Boccaccio has shown a muscular energy of diction 
quite worthy of the pen of Thucydides. Yet there is 
no satisfactory evidence that he had read the similar 
performance of the Greek historian, and the conjecture 
of Baldelli to that effect is founded only on a resem- 
blance of some detached passages, which might well 
occur in treating of a similar disease.* In the delinea- 
tion of its fearful moral consequences, Boccaccio has 
undoubtedly surpassed his predecessor. It is singular 
that of the three celebrated narratives of this distemper, 

* Vita di Boccaccio, lib. ii. s. 2, note. 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 491 

that by the Englishman De Foe is by far the most cir- 
cumstantial in its details, and yet that he was the 
only one of the three historians who was not an eye- 
witness to what he relates.* The Plague of London 
happened in the year succeeding his birth. 

The Italian novelists have followed so closely in the 
track of Boccaccio that we may discuss their general 
attributes without particular reference to him, their 
beauties and their blemishes varying only in degree. 
They ransacked every quarter for their inventions, — 
Eastern legends, Norman fabliaux, domestic history, 
tradition, and vulgar contemporary anecdote. They 
even helped themselves, plenis manibus, to one an- 
other's fancies, particularly filching from the Decam- 
eron, which has for this reason been pleasantly com- 
pared to a pawnbroker's shop. But no exceptions 
seem to be taken at such plagiarism, and, as long as 
the story could be disguised in a different dress, they 
cared little for the credit of the invention. These 
fictions are oftentimes of the most grotesque and im- 
probable character, exhibiting no great skill in the 
liaison of events, which are strung together with the 
rude artlessness of a primitive trouveur, while most 
promising beginnings are frequently brought up by flat 
and impotent conclusions. Many of the novelle are 
made up of mere personal anecdote, proverbialisms, 
and Florentine table-talk, the ingredients of an ency- 
clopaedia of wit. In all this, however, we often find 
less wit than merriment, which shows itself in the most 

* It seems probable, however, from a passage in Boccaccio, cited 
by Bandelli, that he witnessed the plague in some other city of Italy 
than Florence. 



49 2 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



puerile practical jokes, played off upon idiots, unfortu- 
nate pedants, and other imbeciles, with as little taste 
as feeling. 

The novelle wear the usual light and cheerful aspect 
of Italian literature. They seldom aim at a serious or 
didactic purpose. Their tragical scenes, though very 
tragical, are seldom affecting. We recollect in them 
no example of the passion of love treated with the 
depth and tenderness of feeling so frequent in the 
English dramatists and novelists. They can make 
little pretension, indeed, to accurate delineation of 
character of any sort. Even Boccaccio, who has ac- 
quired, in our opinion, a somewhat undeserved celeb- 
rity in this way, paints professions rather than indi- 
viduals. The brevity of the Italian tale, which usually 
affords space only for the exhibition of a catastrophe, 
is an important obstacle to a gradual development of 
character. 

A remarkable trait in these novelle is the extreme 
boldness with which the reputations of the clergy 
are handled. Their venality, lechery, hypocrisy, and 
abominable impositions are all exposed with a reckless 
independence. The head of the Church himself is not 
spared. It is not easy to account for this authorized 
latitude in a country where so jealous a surveillance 
has been maintained over the freedom of the press in 
relation to other topics. Warton attempts to explain 
it, as far as regards the Decameron, by supposing that 
the ecclesiastics of that age had become tainted with 
the dissoluteness so prevalent after the Plague of 1348; 
and Madame de Stael suggests that the government 
winked at this license as the jesting of children, who 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 493 

are content to obey their masters so they may laugh 
at them. But neither of these solutions will suffice ; 
for the license of Boccaccio has been assumed more or 
less by nearly every succeeding novelist, and the jests 
of this merry tribe have been converted into the most 
stinging satire on the clergy, in the hands of the gravest 
and most powerful writers of the nation, from Dante to 
Monti. 

It may be truly objected to the Italian novelists that 
they have been as little solicitous about purity of sen- 
timent as they have been too much so about purity 
of style. The reproach of indecency lies heavily upon 
most of their writings, from the Decameron to the in- 
famous tales of Casti, which, reeking with the corrup- 
tion of a brothel, have passed into several surreptitious 
editions during the present century. This indecency 
is not always a mere excrescence, but deeply ingrained 
in the body of the piece. It is not conveyed in in- 
nuendo, or softened under the varnish of sentiment, 
but is exhibited in all the nakedness of detail which 
a debauched imagination can divine. Petrarch's en- 
comiastic letter to his friend Boccaccio, written at the 
close of his own life, in which he affects to excuse the 
licentiousness of the Decameron from the youth of the 
author,* although he was turned of forty when he com- 
posed it, has been construed into an ample apology for 
their own transgressions by the subsequent school of 
novelists. 

It is true that some of the popes, of a more fastidious 
conscience, have taken exceptions at the license of the 
Decameron, and have placed it on the Index; but an 

* Petrarca Opera, ed. Basil., p. 540. 
42 



494 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



expurgated edition, whose only alteration consisted in 
the substitution of lay names for those of the clergy, 
set all things right again. 

Such adventures as the seduction of a friend's wife, 
or the deceptions practised upon a confiding husband, 
are represented as excellent pieces of wit in these 
fictions, — in some of the best of them, even; and 
often when their authors would be moral they betray, 
in their confused perceptions of right and wrong, the 
most deplorable destitution of a moral sense. Grazzini 
(Jl Lasca), one of the most popular of the tribe of the 
sixteenth century, after invoking, in the most solemn 
manner, the countenance of the Deity upon his labors, 
and beseeching Him to inspire his mind " with such 
thoughts only as may redound to his praise and glory," 
enters immediately, in the next page, upon one of the 
most barefaced specimens of "bold bawdry," to make 
use of the plain language of Roger Ascham, that is to 
be found in the whole work. It is not easy to estimate 
the demoralizing influence of writings many of which, 
being possessed of the beauties of literary finish, are 
elevated into the rank of classics and thus find their 
way into the most reserved and fastidious libraries. 

The literary execution of these tales is, however, by 
no means equal. In some it is even neglected, and in 
all falls below that of their great original. Still, in 
the larger part the graces of style are sedulously cul- 
tivated, and in many constitute the principal merit. 
Some of their authors, especially the more ancient, as 
Sacchetti and Ser Giovanni, derive great repute from 
their picturesque proverbialisms (riboboli), the racy 
slang of the Florentine mob, — pearls of little price 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



495 



with foreigners, but of great estimation with their own 
countrymen. On these qualities, however, as on all 
those of mere external form, a stranger should pro- 
nounce with great diffidence ; but the intellectual and 
moral character of a composition, especially the last, 
are open to universal criticism. The principles of taste 
may differ in different nations; but, however often ob- 
scured by education or habit, there can be only one 
true standard of morality. 

We may concede, then, to many of the novelle the 
merits of a delicate work of art, gracefulness, nay, 
eloquence of style, agreeable facility of narrative, 
pleasantry that sometimes rises into wit, occasional 
developments of character, and an inexhaustible nov- 
elty of situation. But we cannot help regretting that, 
while so many of the finest wits of the nation have 
amused themselves with these compositions, they should 
not have exhibited virtue in a more noble and im- 
posing attitude, or studied a more scientific delinea- 
tion of passion, or a more direct moral aim or prac- 
tical purpose. How rarely do we find, unless it be in 
some few of the last century, the didactic or even 
satirical tone of the English essayists, who seldom 
assume the Oriental garb, so frequent in Italian tales, 
for any other purpose than that of better conveying a 
prudential lesson ! Goldsmith and Hawkesworth may 
furnish us with pertinent examples of this. How 
rarely do we recognize in these novelle the living por- 
traiture of Chaucer, or the philosophical point which 
sharpens the pleasantry of La Fontaine ; both com- 
petitors in the same walk. Without any higher object 
than that of present amusement, these productions, 



496 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

like many others of their elegant literature, seem to 
be thrown off in the mere gayety of the heart. 

Chaucer, in his peculiarities, represents as faithfully 
those of the English nation as his rival and contem- 
porary Boccaccio represents the Italian. In a searching 
anatomy of the human heart he as far excels the latter 
as in rhetorical beauty he is surpassed by him. The 
prologue to his Canterbury Tales alone contains a gal- 
lery of portraits such as is not to be found in the whole 
compass of the Decameron ; his friar, for example, 

" That somewhat lisped from his wantonnesse 
To make his Englishe sweete upon his tonge ;" 

his worthy parson, "glad to teche and glad to lerne;" 
his man of law, who, 

" Though so besy a man as he ther n' as, 
Yet seemed besier than he was ;" 

and his inimitable wag of a host, breaking his jests, 
like Falstaff, indiscriminately upon every one he meets. 
Chaucer was a shrewd observer of the realities of life. 
He did not indulge in day-dreams of visionary perfec- 
tion. His little fragment of Sir Thopaz is a fine quiz 
upon the incredibilia of chivalry. In his conclusion 
of the story of the patient Griselde, instead of adopt- 
ing the somewhat fade eulogiums of Boccaccio, he 
good-naturedly jests at the ultra perfection of the 
heroine. Like Shakspeare and Scott, his successors 
and superiors in the school of character, he seems to 
have had too vivid a perception of the vanities of 
human life to allow him for a moment to give in to 
those extravagances of perfection which have sprung 
from the brain of so many fond enthusiasts. 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 497 

Chaucer's genius was everyway equal to that of Boc- 
caccio, yet the direct influence of the one can scarcely 
be discerned beyond his own age, while that of the 
other has reached to the present generation. A prin- 
cipal cause of this is the difference of their style ; that 
of the former exhibiting only the rude graces of a 
primitive dialect, while Boccaccio's may be said to 
nave reached the full prime of a cultivated period. 
Another cause is discernible in the new and more suit- 
able forms which came to be adopted for that delin- 
eation of character which constitutes the essence of 
Chaucer's fictions, viz., those of the drama and the 
extended novel, in both of which Italian literature has, 
until' very recently, been singularly deficient. Boc- 
caccio made two elaborate essays in novel-writing, but 
his genius seems to have been ill adapted to it, and in 
his strange and prolix narrative, which brings upon 
the stage again the obsolete deities of antiquity, even 
the natural graces of his style desert him. The at- 
tempt has scarcely been repeated until our day, when 
the impulse communicated by the English, in romance 
and historical novel-writing, to other nations on the 
Continent, seems to have extended itself to Italy; and 
the extraordinary favor which has been shown there to 
the first essays in this way may perhaps lead eventually 
to more brilliant successes. 

The Spaniards, under no better circumstances than 
the Italians, made, previously to the last-mentioned 
period, a nearer approach to the genuine novel. Cer- 
vantes has furnished, amid his caricatures of chivalry, 
many passages of exquisite pathos and pleasantry, and 
a rich variety of national portraiture. The same, 

42* 



498 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

though in a less degree, may be affirmed of his shorter 
tales, Novelets exemplares, which, however inferior to 
those of the Decameron in rhetorical elegance, cer- 
tainly surpass them in their practical application. But 
the peculiar property of the Spaniards is \\\€\x picaresco 
novel, a mere chronicle of the adventures and mis- 
chievous pranks of young pickpockets and chevaliers 
(T Industrie, invented, whimsically enough, by a Castilian 
grandee, one of the proudest of his caste, and which, 
notwithstanding the glaring contrast it affords to the 
habitual gravity of the nation, has, perhaps from this 
very circumstance, been a great favorite with it ever 
since. 

The French have made other advances in novel- 
writing. They have produced many specimens of wit 
and of showy sentiment, but they seldom afford any 
wide range of observation or searching views of char- 
acter. The conventional breeding that universally 
prevails in France has levelled all inequalities of rank, 
and obliterated, as it were, the moral physiognomy of 
the different classes, which, however salutary in other 
respects, is exceedingly unpropitious to the purposes 
of the novelist. Moiiere, the most popular character- 
monger of the French, has penetrated the superficies 
of the most artificial state of society. His spirited 
sketches of fashionable folly, though very fine, very 
Parisian, are not always founded on the universal prin- 
ciples of human nature, and, when founded on these, 
they are sure to be carried more or less into caricature. 
The French have little of the English talent for humor. 
They have buffoonery, a lively wit, and a naivete be- 
yond the reach of art, — Rabelais, Voltaire, La Fon- 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



499 



taine, — every thing but humor. How spiritless and 
affected are the caricatures so frequently stuck up at 
their shop-windows, and which may be considered as the 
popular expression in this way, compared with those 
of the English ! It is impossible to conceive of a 
French Goldsmith or Fielding, a Hogarth or a Wilkie. 
They have, indeed, produced a Le Sage, but he seems 
to have confessed the deficiency of his own nation by 
deriving his models exclusively from a foreign one. 

On the other hand, the freedom of the political and 
social institutions, both in this country and in Eng- 
land, which has encouraged the undisguised expansion 
of intellect and of peculiarities of temper, has made 
them the proper theatre for the student of his species. 
Hence man has been here delineated with an accuracy 
quite unrivalled in any ancient or modern nation, 
and, as the Greeks have surpassed every later people 
in statuary, from their familiarity with the visible 
naked forms of manly beauty, so the English may be 
said, from an analogous cause, to have excelled all 
others in moral portraiture. To this point their most 
eminent artists have directed their principal attention. 
We have already noticed it in Chaucer. It formed the 
essence of the drama in Elizabeth's time, as it does 
that of the modern novel. Shakspeare and Scott, in 
their respective departments, have undoubtedly carried 
this art to the highest perfection of which it is capable, 
sacrificing to it every minor consideration of proba- 
bility, incident, and gradation of plot, which they 
seem to have valued only so far as they might be made 
subservient to the main purpose of a clearer exposition 
of character. 



5°° 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



But it is time to return from the digression into 
which we have been led by a desire of illustrating cer- 
tain peculiarities of Italian literature, which can in no 
way be done so well as by comparing them with those 
of corresponding departments in other languages. Such 
a comparison abundantly shows how much deeper and 
more philosophical have been the views proposed by 
prose fiction in England than in Italy. 

We have reserved the Drama for the last, as, until a 
very recent period, it has been less prolific in eminent 
models than either of the great divisions of Italian 
letters. Yet it has been the one most assiduously cul- 
tivated from a very early period, and this, too, by the 
ripest scholars and most approved wits. The career 
was opened by such minds as Ariosto and Machiavelli, 
at a time when the theatres in other parts of Europe 
had given birth only to the unseemly abortions of 
mysteries and moralities. Bouterwek has been led 
into a strange error in imputing the low condition of 
the Italian drama to the small number of men of even 
moderate abilities who have cultivated it.* A glance 
at the long muster-roll of eminent persons employed 
upon it, from Machiavelli to Monti, will prove the 
contrary.f The unprecedented favor bestowed on the 
most successful of the dramatic writers may serve to 
show, at least, the aspirations of the people. The Me- 
rope of MafTei, which may be deemed the first dawn 

* See the conclusion of his History of Spanish Literature. 

f See Allacci's Drammaturgia, passitn, and Riccoboni, Theatre 
Ital., torn. i. pp. 187-208. Allacci's catalogue, as continued down to 
the middle of the eighteenth century, occupies nearly a thousand 
quarto pages. 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



5° l 



of improvement in the tragic art, passed through sixty 
editions. Notwithstanding all this, the Italians, in 
comedy, and still more in tragedy, until the late ap- 
parition of Alfieri, remained far below several of the 
other nations of Europe. 

A principal cause of their repeated failures has been 
often referred to the inherent vices of their system, 
which required a blind conformity with the supposed 
rules of Aristotle. Under the cumbrous load of an- 
tiquity, the freedom and grace of natural movement 
were long impeded. Their first attempts were transla- 
tions, or literal imitations, of the Latin theatre. Some 
of these, though objectionable in form, contain the 
true spirit of comedy. Those of Ariosto and Machia- 
velli in particular, with even greater licentiousness of 
detail and a more immoral conclusion than belong 
either to Plautus or Terence, fully equal, perhaps sur- 
pass them, in their spirited and whimsical draughts of 
character. Ariosto is never more a satirist than in his 
comedies ; and Machiavelli, in his Mandragola, has 
exposed the hypocrisies of religion with a less glaring 
caricature than Moliere has shown in his Tartuffe. The 
spirit of these great masters did not descend to their 
immediate successors. Goldoni, however, the Moliere 
of Italy, in his numerous comedies or farces, has suc- 
ceeded in giving a lively, graphic portraiture of local 
manners, with infinite variety and comic power, but 
no great depth of interest. He has seldom risen to 
refined and comprehensive views of society, and his 
pieces, we may trust, are not to be received as faith- 
fully reflecting the national character, which they would 
make singularly deficient both in virtue and the prin- 



502 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

ciple of honor. The writers who have followed in the 
footsteps of Goldoni exhibit, for the most part, similar 
defects, with far inferior comic talent. Their pro- 
ductions, on the whole, however, may be thought to 
maintain an advantageous comparison with those of 
any other people in Europe during the same period, 
although some of them, to judge from the encomiastic 
tone of their critics, appear to have obtained a wider 
celebrity with their contemporaries than will be prob- 
ably conceded to them by posterity. The comedies of 
a?'t which Goldoni superseded, and which were, per- 
haps, more indicative of the national taste than any 
other dramatic performances, can hardly come within 
the scope of literary criticism. 

The Italian writers would seem not even to have 
agreed upon a suitable measure for comedy, some 
using the common versi sciolti, some the sdruccioli, 
others, again, the martelliani, and many more pre- 
ferring prose.* Another impediment to their success 
is the great variety of dialects in Italy, as numerous 
as her petty states, which prevents the recognition 
of any one uniform style of familiar conversation for 
comedy. The greater part of the pieces of Goldoni 
are written, more or less, in the local idiom of one of 
the extremities of Italy, — an inconvenience which can- 
not exist and which can hardly be appreciated in a 
country where one acknowledged capital has settled 
the medium of polite intercourse. 

* Professor Salfi affirms prose to be the most suitable, indeed the 
only proper, dress for Italian comedy. See his sensible critiqtce on 
the Italian comic drama, prefixed to the late edition of Alberto 
Nota's Commedie, Paris, 1829. 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 503 

The progress of the nation in the tragic art, until a 
late period, has been yet more doubtful. Some notion 
may be formed of its low state in the last century from 
the circumstance that when the players were in want 
of a serious piece they could find none so generally 
acceptable as an opera of Metastasio, stripped of its 
musical accompaniments. The appearance of Alfieri 
at this late season, of a genius so austere, in the midst 
of the voluptuous, Sybarite effeminacy of the period, 
is a remarkable phenomenon. It was as if the severe 
Doric proportions of a Paestum temple had been sud- 
denly raised up amid the airy forms of Palladian ar- 
chitecture. The reserved and impenetrable character 
of this man has been perfectly laid open to us in his 
own autobiography. It was made up of incongruity 
and paradox. To indomitable passions he joined the 
most frigid exterior. With the fiercest aristocratic na- 
ture, he yet quitted his native state that he might enjoy 
unmolested the sweets of liberty. He published one 
philippic against kings, and another against the people. 
His theoretic love of freedom was far from being 
warmed by the genuine glow of patriotism. Of all his 
tragedies, he condescended to derive two only from 
Italian history; and when, in his prefaces, dedications, 
or elsewhere, he takes occasion to notice his country- 
men, he does it in the bitterness of irony and insult. 

When he first set about his tragedies, he could com- 
pose only in a sort of French and Piedmontese /<?/<?/>. 
He was unacquainted with any written dramatic litera- 
ture, though he had witnessed the theatrical exhibitions 
of the principal capitals of Europe. He was. therefore, 
to form himself all fresh upon such models as he might 



504 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

prefer. His haughty spirit carried him back to the 
trecentisti, especially to Dante, whose stern beauties he 
sedulously endeavored to transfuse into his own style. 
He studied Tacitus, moreover, with diligence, and 
made three entire translations of Sallust. He was 
greatly afraid of falling into the cantilena of Metas- 
tasio, and sought to avoid this by sudden abruptions 
of language, by an eccentric use of the articles and 
pronouns, by dislocating the usual structure of verse, 
and by distributing the emphatic words with exclusive 
reference to the sense.* 

This unprecedented manner brought upon Alfieri a 
host of critics, and he was compelled, in a subsequent 
edition, to soften down its most offensive asperities. 
He imputes to himself as many different styles of com- 
position as distinguish the works of Raphael, and it is 
pretty evident that he considers the last as near perfec- 
tion as he could well hope to attain. It is, indeed, 
a noble style : with the occasional turbulence of a 
mighty rapid, it has all its fulness and magnificent 
flow ; and it shows how utterly impossible it is, by 
any effort of art, to repress the natural melody of the 
Tuscan. 

Alfieri effected a still more important revolution in 
the intellectual character of the drama, arousing it 
from the lethargy into which it had fallen, and making 
it the vehicle of generous and heroic sentiment. He 
forced his pieces sometimes, it is true, by violent con- 
trast, but he brought out his characters with a fulness 
of relief and exhibited a dexterous combat of passion 

* See a summary of these peculiarities in Casalbigi's Letter, pre- 
fixed to the late editions of Alfieri's tragedies. 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 505 

that may not unfrequently remind us of Shakspeare. 
He dismissed all supernumeraries from his plays, and 
put into action what his predecessors had coldly nar- 
rated. He dispensed, moreover, with the curious co- 
incidences, marvellous surprises, and all the bet colpi 
di scena so familiar in the plays of Metastasio. He 
disdained even the poetical aid of imagery, relying 
wholly for effect on the dignity of his sentiments and 
the imposing character of his agents. 

Alfieri has been thought to have made a nearer ap- 
proach to the Greek tragedy than any of the moderns. 
He, indeed, disclaims the imitation of any foreign 
model, and he did not learn the Greek till late in life; 
but the drama of his own nation had always been ser- 
vilely accommodated to the rules of the ancients, and 
he himself had rigorously adhered to the same code. 
His severe genius, too, wears somewhat of the aspect 
of that of the father of Grecian tragedy, with which 
it has been repeatedly compared ; but any apparent 
resemblance in their compositions vanishes on a closer 
inspection. The assassination of Agamemnon, for ex- 
ample, forms the subject of a tragedy with both these 
writers; but on what different principles is it conducted 
by each ! The larger proportion of the play of ^Es- 
chylus is taken up with the melancholy monologues 
of Cassandra and the chorus, which, boding the coming 
disasters of the house of Atreus, or mourning over the 
destiny of man, are poured forth in a lofty dithyrambic 
eloquence that gives to the whole the air of a lyrical 
rather than a dramatic composition. It was this lyrical 
enthusiasm which, doubtless, led Plutarch to ascribe 
the inspiration of ^Eschylus to the influence of the 
w 43 



506 biographical and 

grape.* The dialogue of the piece is of a most in- 
artificial texture, and to an English audience might 
sometimes appear flat. The action moves heavily, 
and the principal — indeed, with the exception of Aga- 
memnon, the only — attempt at character is in the part 
of Clytemnestra, whose gigantic stature overshadows 
the whole piece, and who appalls the spectator by 
avowing the deed of assassination with the same ferocity 
with which she had executed it. 

Alfieri, on the other hand, refuses the subsidiary, 
aids of poetical imagery. He expressly condemns, in 
his criticisms, a confounding of the lyric and the dra- 
matic styles. He elaborated his dialogue with the 
nicest art and with exclusive reference to the final 
catastrophe. Scenes -non levis artifex. His principal 
aim is to exhibit the collision of passions. The con- 
flicts between passion and principle in the bosom of 
Clytemnestra, whom he has made a subordinate agent, 
furnish him with his most powerful scenes. He has 
portrayed the Iago-like features of ^Egisthus in the 
darkest colors of Italian vengeance. The noble nature 
of Agamemnon stands more fully developed than in 
the Greek, and the sweet character of Electra is all his 
own. The assassination of the king of men in his 
bed, at the lonely hour of midnight, must forcibly 
remind the English reader of the similar scene in Mac- 
beth * but, though finely conceived, it is far inferior 
to the latter in those fearful poetical accompaniments 

* Sympos. LVIL, Prob. 10. In the same spirit, a critic of a more 
polished age has denounced Shakspeare's Hamlet as the work of a 
drunken savage ! See Voltaire's Dissertation sur la Tragedie, etc., 
addressed to Cardinal Querini. 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 507 

which give such an air of breathless horror to the story. 
In solemn, mysterious imaginings, who indeed can 
equal Shakspeare ? He is the only modern poet who 
has succeeded in introducing the dim torm of an ap- 
parition on the stage with any tolerable effect. Yet 
Voltaire accuses him of mistaking the horrible for the 
terrible. When Voltaire had occasion to raise a ghost 
upon the French stage (a ticklish experiment), he made 
him so amiable in his aspect that Queen Semiramis 
politely desires leave to " throw herself at his feet and 
to embrace them." * 

It has been a matter of debate whether Italian 
tragedy, as reformed by Alfieri, is an improvement on 
the French. Both are conducted on the same general 
principles. A. W. Schlegel, a competent critic when- 
ever his own prejudices are not involved, decides in 
favor of the French. We must confess ourselves in- 
clined to a different opinion. The three master-spirits 
in French tragedy seem to have contained within them- 
selves all the elements of dramatic creation, yet their 
best performances have something tame and unsatis- 
factory in them. We see the influence of that fine- 
spun web of criticism which in France has bound the 
wing of genius to the earth, and which no one has 
been hardy enough to burst asunder. Corneille, after 
a severe lesson, submitted to it, though with an ill 
grace. The flexible character of Racine moved under 
it with more freedom, but he was of too timid a tem- 
per to attempt to contravene established prejudices. 
His reply to one who censured him for making Hip- 
poly te in love, in his Phedre, is well known : " What 

* Semiramis, acte iii. s. 6. 



5 o8 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



would our petits-maitres have said had I omitted it?" 
Voltaire, although possessed of a more enterprising 
and revolutionary spirit, left the essential principles 
of the drama as he found them. His multifarious 
criticisms exhibit a perpetual paradox. His general 
principles are ever at variance with their particular 
application. No one lauds more highly the scientific 
system of his countrymen ; witness his numerous dra- 
matic prefaces, dedications, and articles in the ency- 
clopaedia. He even refines upon it with hypercritical 
acumen, as in his commentaries on Corneille. But 
when he feels its tyrannical pressure on himself, he is 
sure to wince ; see, for example, his lamentable protest 
in his Preface to Brutus. 

Alfieri acknowledged the paramount authority of the 
ancients equally with the French dramatic writers. He 
has but thrice violated the unity of place, and very 
rarely that of time ; but, with all his deference for an- 
tiquity, the Italian poet has raised himself far above 
the narrow code of French criticism. He has relieved 
tragedy from that eternal chime of love-sick damsels, 
so indispensable in a French piece that, as Voltaire 
informs us, out of four hundred which had appeared 
before his time, there were not more than twelve which 
did not turn upon love. He substituted in its place a 
more pure and exalted sentiment. It will be difficult 
to find, even in Racine, such beautiful personifications 
of female loveliness as his Electra and Micol, to name 
no others. He has, moreover, dispensed with the con- 
fidantes, those insipid shadows that so invariably walk 
the round of the French stage. Instead of insulated 
axioms and long rhetorical pleadings, he has intro- 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



5°9 



duced a brisk, moving dialogue ; and instead of the 
ceremonious breeding, the perruque and chafieau borde, 
of Louis the Fourteenth's court, his personages, to bor- 
row an allusion from a sister art, are sculptured with 
the bold natural freedom which distinguishes the school 
of Michael Angelo. 

It is true that they are apt to show too much of the 
same fierce and sarcastic temper, too much of a family 
likeness with himself and with one another ; that he 
sometimes mistakes passion for poetry; that he has left 
this last too naked of imagery and rhetorical ornament; 
that he is sometimes stilted when he would be digni- 
fied ; and that his affected energy is too often carried 
into mere muscular contortions. His system has, in- 
deed, the appearance of an aspiration after some ideal 
standard of excellence which he could not wholly at- 
tain. It is sufficient proof of his power, however, that 
he succeeded in establishing it, in direct opposition to 
the ancient taste of his countrymen, to their love of 
poetic imagery, of verbal melody, and voluptuousness 
of sentiment. It is the triumph of genius over the 
prejudices, and even the constitutional feelings, of a 
nation. 

We have dwelt thus long on Alfieri, because, like 
Dante, he seems himself to constitute a separate de- 
partment in Italian literature. It is singular that the 
two poets who present the earliest and the latest models 
of surpassing excellence in this literature should bear 
so few of its usual characteristics. Alfieri' s example 
has effected a decided revolution in the theatrical taste 
of his countrymen. It has called forth the efforts of 
some of their most gifted minds. Monti, perhaps the 

43* 



5i° 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



most eminent of this school, surpasses him in the 
graces of an easy and brilliant elocution, but falls far 
below him in energy of conception and character. 
The stoical system of Alfieri would seem, indeed, bet- 
ter adapted to his own peculiar temperament than to 
that of his nation ; and the successful experiment of 
Manzoni in discarding the unities, and otherwise re- 
laxing the unnatural rigidity of this system, would 
appear to be much better suited to the popular taste 
as well as talent. 

Our limits, necessarily far too scanty for our subject, 
will not allow us to go into the Opera and the Pastoral 
Drama, two beautiful divisions in this department of 
Italian letters. It is singular that the former, notwith- 
standing the natural sensibility of the Italians to har- 
mony, and the melody of their language, which almost 
sets itself to music as it is spoken, should have been so 
late in coming to its perfection under Metastasio. No- 
thing can be more unfair than to judge of this author, 
or, indeed, of any composer of operas, by the effect 
produced on us in the closet. Their pieces are in- 
tended to be exhibited, not read. The sentimental 
a?iettes of the heroes, the romantic bombast of the 
heroines, the racks, ropes, poisoned daggers, and other 
fee-faw-fum of a nursery tale, so plentifully besprinkled 
over them, have certainly, in the closet, a very fade 
and ridiculous aspect ; but an opera should be consid- 
ered as an appeal to the senses by means of the illu- 
sions of music, dancing, and decorations. The poetry, 
wit, sentiment, intrigue, are mere accessories, and of 
value only as they may serve to promote this illusion. 
Hence the necessity of love, — 'love, the vivifying prin- 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



5 11 



ciple of the opera, the only passion in perfect accord- 
ance with its voluptuous movements. Hence the pro- 
priety of exhibiting character in exaggerated color of 
light and shadow, the chiar -oscuro of poetry, as the 
imagination is most forcibly affected by powerful con- 
trast. Yet this has been often condemned in Metasta- 
sio. On the above principle, too, the seasonable dis- 
closures, miraculous escapes, and all the other magical 
apparatus before alluded to, may be defended. The 
mind of the spectator, highly stimulated through the 
medium of the senses, requires a corresponding ex- 
travagance, if we may so say, in the creations of the 
poet. In this state, a veracious copy of nature would 
fall flat and powerless ; to reach the heart, it must be 
raised into gigantic proportions, and adorned with a 
brighter flush of coloring than is to be found in real 
life. As a work of art, then, but not as a purely in- 
tellectual exhibition, we may criticise the opera, and, 
in this view of it, the peculiarities so often condemned 
in the artist may be, perhaps, sufficiently justified. 

The Pastoral Drama, that attempt to shadow forth 
the beautiful absurdities of a golden age, claims to be 
invented by the Italians. It was carried to its ultimate 
perfection in two of its earliest specimens, the poems 
of Tasso and Guarini. Both these writers have adorned 
their subject with the highest charms of versification 
and imagery. With Tasso all this seems to proceed 
spontaneously from the heart, while Guarini' s Pastor 
Fido, on the other hand, has the appearance of being 
elaborated with the nicest preparation. It may, in 
truth, be regarded as the solitary monument of his 
genius, and as such he seems to have been desirous to 



5" 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



concentrate within it every possible variety of excel- 
lence. During his whole life he was employed in 
retouching and enriching it with new beauties. This 
great variety and finish of details somewhat impair its 
unity, and give it too much the appearance of a cu- 
rious collection of specimens. Yet there are those, 
and very competent critics too, who prefer the splendid 
patchwork of Guarini to the sweet, unsolicited beauties 
of his rival. Dr. Johnson has condemned both the 
Aminta and Pastor Fido as "trifles easily imitated and 
unworthy of imitation." The Italians have not found 
them so. Out of some hundred specimens cited by 
Serassi, only three or four are deemed by him worthy 
of notice. An English critic should have shown more 
charity for a kind of composition that has given rise 
to some of the most exquisite creations of Fletcher 
and Milton. 

We have now reviewed the most important branches 
of the ornamental literature of the Italians. We omit 
some others, less conspicuous, or not essentially differ- 
ing in their characteristics from similar departments in 
the literatures of other European nations. An excep- 
tion may perhaps be made in favor of satirical writing, 
which, with the Italians, assumes a peculiar form, and 
one quite indicative of the national genius. Satire, in 
one shape or another, has been a great favorite with 
them, from Ariosto, or, indeed, we may say Dante, to 
the present time. It is, for the most part, of a light, 
vivacious character, rather playful than pointed. Their 
critics, with their usual precision, have subdivided it 
into a great variety of classes, among which the Ber- 
nesque is the most original. This epithet, derived not, 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 513 

as some have supposed, from the rifacimento but from 
the Capitoli of Berni, designates a style of writing 
compounded of the beautiful and the burlesque, of 
which it is nearly impossible to convey an adequate 
notion, either by translation or description, in a for- 
eign language. Even so mature a scholar as Mr. Ros- 
coe has failed to do this, when, in one of his histories, 
he compares this manner to that of Peter Pindar, and 
in the other to that of Sterne. But the Italian has 
neither the coarse diction of the former nor the senti- 
ment of the latter. It is generally occupied with some 
frivolous topic, to which it ascribes the most extrava- 
gant properties, descanting on it through whole pages 
of innocent irony, and clothing the most vulgar and 
oftentimes obscene ideas in the polished phrase or 
idiomatic graces of expression that never fail to disarm 
an Italian critic. A foreigner, however, not so sensible 
to the seductions of style, will scarcely see in it any- 
thing more than a puerile debauch of fancy. 

Historians are fond of distributing the literature of 
Italy into masses, chronologically arranged in succes- 
sive centuries. The successive revolutions in this lit- 
erature justify the division to a degree unknown in that 
of any other country, and a brief illustration of it may 
throw some additional light on our subject. 

Thus the fourteenth century, the age of the trecentisti, 
as it is called, the age of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccac- 
cio, is the period of high and original invention. These 
three great writers, who are alone capable of attracting 
our attention at this distance of time, were citizens of a 
free state, and were early formed to the contemplation 
and practice of public virtue. Hence their works mani- 
w* 



5i4 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



fest an independence and a generous self-confidence 
that we seek in vain in the productions of a later pe- 
riod, forced in the artificial atmosphere of a court. 
Their writings are marked, moreover, by a depth of 
reflection not to be discerned in the poets of a similar 
period of antiquity, the pioneers of the civilization of 
their times. The human mind was then in its infancy; 
but in the fourteenth century it seemed to awake from 
the slumber of ages, with powers newly invigorated, 
and a memory stored with the accumulated wisdom of 
the past. Compare, for example, the Divine Comedy 
with the poems of Homer and Hesiod, and observe 
how much superior to these latter writers is the Italian 
in moral and intellectual science, as well as in those 
higher speculations which relate to our ultimate des- 
tiny.* The rhetorical beauties of the great works 
of the fourteenth century have equally contributed to 
their permanent popularity and influence. While the 
early productions of other countries, the poems of the 
Niebelungen, of the Cid, of the Norman trouveurs, and 
those of Chaucer, even, have passed, in consequence of 
their colloquial barbarisms, into a certain degree of 
oblivion, the writings of the trecentisti are still revered 
as the models of purity and elegance, to be forever 
imitated, though never equalled. 

The following age exhibits the reverse of all this. 
It was as remarkable for the general diffusion of learn- 

* Hesiod, it is true, has digested a compact body of ethics, won- 
derfully mature for the age in which he wrote ; but the best of it is 
disfigured with those childish superstitions which betray the twilight 
of civilization. See, in particular, the concluding portion of his 
Works and Davs. 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 515 

ing as the preceding had been for the concentration 
of talent. The Italian, which had been so successfully 
cultivated, came to be universally neglected for the 
ancient languages. It would seem as if the soil, ex- 
hausted by too abundant harvests, must lie fallow an- 
other century before it could be capable of reproduction. 
The scholars of that day disdained any other than the 
Latin tongue for the medium of their publications, or 
even of their private epistolary correspondence. They 
thought, with Waller, that 

" Those who lasting marble seek 
Must carve in. Latin or in Greek." 

But the marble has crumbled into dust, while the nat- 
ural beauties of their predecessors are still green in the 
memory of their countrymen. To make use of a simile 
which Dr. Young applied to Ben Jonson, they "pulled 
down, like Samson, the temple of antiquity on their 
shoulders, and buried themselves under its ruins." 

But let us not err by despising these men as a race 
of unprofitable pedants. They lived on the theatre of 
ancient art, in an age when new discoveries were daily 
making of the long-lost monuments of intellectual and 
material beauty, and it is no wonder that, dazzled with 
the contemplation of these objects, they should have 
been blind to the modest merits of their contempora- 
ries. We should be grateful to men whose indefati- 
gable labors preserved for us the perishable remains of 
classic literature, and who thus opened a free and fa- 
miliar converse with the great minds of antiquity; and 
we may justly feel some degree of reverence for the 
enthusiasm of an age in which the scholar was willing 



5i6 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



to exchange his learned leisure for painful and perilous 
pilgrimages, when the merchant was content to barter 
his rich freights for a few mouldering, worm-eaten 
folios, and when the present of a single manuscript was 
deemed of sufficient value to heal the dissensions of 
two rival states. Such was the fifteenth century in 
Italy; and Tiraboschi, warming as he approaches it, 
in his preface to the sixth volume of his history, has 
accordingly invested it with more than his usual blaze 
of panegyric. 

The genius of the Italians, however, was sorely fet- 
tered by their adoption of an ancient idiom, and, like 
Tasso's Erminia when her delicate form was enclosed 
in the iron mail of the warrior, lost its elasticity and 
grace. But at the close of the century the Italian 
muse was destined to regain her natural freedom in the 
court of Lorenzo de' Medici. His own compositions, 
especially, are distinguished by a romantic sweetness, 
and his light popular pieces, — Carnascialeschi, Conta- 
dineschi, — so abundantly imitated since, have a buoy- 
ant, exhilarating air, wholly unlike the pedantic tone 
of his age. Under these new auspices, however, the 
Italian received a very different complexion from that 
which had been imparted to it by the hand of Dante. 

The sixteenth century is the healthful, the Augustan 
age of Italian letters. The conflicting principles of 
an ancient and a modern school are, however, to be 
traced throughout almost the whole course of it. A 
curious passage from Varchi, who flourished about the 
middle of this century, informs us that when he was at 
school it was the custom of the instructors to interdict 
to their pupils the study of any vernacular writer, even 






CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



5*7 



Dante and Petrarch.* Hence the Latin came to be 
cultivated almost equally with the Italian, and both, 
singularly enough, attained simultaneously their full 
development. 

There are few phrases more inaccurately applied 
than that of the Age of Leo X., to whose brief pon- 
tificate we are accustomed to refer most of the magnifi- 
cent creations of genius scattered over the sixteenth 
century, although very few, even of those produced in 
his own reign, can be imputed to his influence. The 
nature of this influence in regard to Italian letters 
may even admit of question. His early taste led him 
to give an almost exclusive attention to the ancient 
classics. The great poets of that century, Ariosto, 
Sanazzaro, the Tassos, Rucellai, Guarini, and the rest, 
produced their immortal works far from Leo's court. 
Even Bembo, the oracle of his day, retired in disgust 
from his patron, and composed his principal writings 
in his retreat. Ariosto, his ancient friend, he coldly 
neglected, f while he pensioned the infamous Aretin. 
He surrounded his table with buffoon literati and para- 
sitical poets, who amused him with feats of improvisa- 
tion, gluttony, and intemperance, some of whom, after 
expending on them his convivial wit, he turned over 
to public derision, and most of whom, debauched in 
morals and constitution, were abandoned, under his 
austere successor, to infamy and death. He collected 
about him such court-flies as Berni and Molza; but, as 

* Ercolano, Ques. VIII. 

f Roscoe attempts to explain away the conduct of Leo ; but the 
satires of the poet furnish a bitter commentary upon it, not to be 
misunderstood. 

44 



5i8 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



if the papal atmosphere were fatal to high continued 
effort, even Berni, like Trissino and Rucellai, could 
find no leisure for his more elaborate performance till 
after his patron's death. He magnificently recom- 
pensed his musical retainers, making one an arch- 
bishop, another an archdeacon ; but what did he do 
for his countryman Machiavelli, the philosopher of his 
age?* He hunted, and hawked, and caroused; every 
thing was a jest ; and while the nations of Europe 
stood aghast at the growing heresy of Luther, the 
merry pontiff and his ministers found strange matter 
of mirth in witnessing the representation of comedies 
that exposed the impudent mummeries of priestcraft. 
With such an example, and under such an influence, it 
is no wonder that nothing better should have been 
produced than burlesque satire, licentious farces, and 
frivolous impromptus. Contrast all this with the ele- 
gant recreations of the little court of Urbino, as de- 
scribed in the Cortegiano ; or compare the whole 
result on Italian letters of the so much vaunted pat- 
ronage of this luxurious pontiff with the splendid 
achievements of the petty state of Este alone during 
the first half of this century, and it will appear that 
there are few misnomers which convey grosser mis- 
conceptions than that of the age of Leo X. 

The seventeenth century {seicento is one of hu- 
miliation in the literary annals of Italy; one in which 
the Muse, like some dilapidated beauty, endeavored to 

* Machiavelli, after having suffered torture on account of a sus- 
pected conspiracy against the Medici, in which his participation was 
never proved, was allowed to linger out his days in poverty and 
disgrace. 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



5 J 9 



supply the loss of natural charms by all the aids of 
coquetry and meretricious ornament. It is the prodi- 
gal use of "these false brilliants," as Boileau terms 
them, in some of their best writers, which has brought 
among foreigners an undeserved discredit on the whole 
body of Italian letters, and which has made the con- 
demned age of the seicentisti a by-word of reproach 
even with their own countrymen. The principles of 
a corrupt taste are, however, to be discerned at an 
earlier period, in the writings of Tasso especially, and 
still more of Guarini ; but it was reserved for Marin i 
to reduce them into a system, and by his popularity 
and foreign residence to diffuse the infection among 
the other nations of Europe. To this source, there- 
fore, most of these nations have agreed to refer the 
impurities which at one time or another have disfig- 
ured their literatures. Thus the Spaniard Lampillas 
has mustered an array of seven volumes to prove the 
charge of original corruption on the Italians, though 
Marini openly affected to have formed himself upon a 
Spanish model.* In like manner, La Harpe imputes 
to them the sins of Jodelle and the contemporary wits, 
though these last preceded by some years the literary 
existence of Marini ; and the vices of the English 
metaphysical school have been expressly referred by 
Dr. Johnson to Marini and his followers. 

A nearer inspection, however, might justify the 
opinion that these various affectations bear too much 
of the physiognomy of the respective nations in which 
they are found, and are capable of being traced to too 
high a source in each, to be thus exclusively imputed 

* Obras sueltas de Lope de Vega, torn. xxi. p. 17. 



520 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



to the Italians. Thus the elements of the cultisi7io of 
the Spaniards, that compound of flat pedantry and Ori- 
ental hyperbole, so different from the fine concetti of 
the Italian, are to be traced through some of their most 
eminent writers up to the fugitive pieces of the fifteenth 
century, as collected in their Cancioneros ; and, in 
like manner, the elements of the metaphysical jargon 
of Cowley, whose intellectual combinations and far- 
fetched analogies show too painful a research after wit 
for the Italian taste, maybe traced in England through 
Donne and Ben Jonson, to say nothing of the "un- 
paralleled John Lillie," up to the veteran versifiers of 
the fifteenth and fourteenth centuries. Thus, also, 
some features of the style precieux of the Hotel de 
Rambouillet, so often lashed by Boileau and laughed 
at by Moliere, may be imputed to the malign influence 
of the constellation of pedants celebrated in France 
under the title of Pleiades, in the sixteenth century. 

The Greek is the only literature which from the 
first seems to have maintained a sound and healthful 
state. In every other, the barbaric love of ornament, 
so discernible even in the best of the earlier writers, 
has been chastised only by long and assiduous criti- 
cism ; but the principle of corruption still remains, 
and the season of perfect ripeness seems to be only 
that of the commencement of decay. Thus it was in 
Italy in the perverted age of the seicentisti, an age 
yet warm with the productions of an Ariosto and a 
Tasso. 

The literature of the Italians assumed in the last 
century a new and highly improved aspect. With 
less than its usual brilliancy of imagination, it dis- 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 521 

played an intensity, and, under the circumstances in 
which it has been produced, we may add, intrepidity 
of thought quite worthy of the great spirits of the four- 
teenth century, and a freedom and nature in its descrip- 
tions altogether opposed to the heartless affectations 
of the seventeenth. The prejudicial influence of their 
neighbors threatened at one time, indeed, to precipi- 
tate the language into a French i?iacheronico ; but a 
counter-current, equally exclusive, in favor of the tre- 
centisti, contributed to check the innovation and to 
carry them back to the ancient models of purity and 
vigor. The most eminent writers of this period seem 
to have formed themselves on Dante, in particular, as 
studiously as those of the preceding age affected the 
more effeminate graces of Petrarch. Among these, 
Monti, who, in the language of his master, may be 
truly said to have inherited from him " Lo bello stile, 
che l'ha fatto onore," is thought most nearly to re- 
semble Dante in the literary execution of his verses ; 
while Alfieri, Parini, and Foscolo approach him still 
nearer in the rugged virtue and independence of their 
sentiments. There seems to be a didactic import in 
much of the poetry of this age, too, and, in its descrip- 
tions of external nature, a sober, contemplative vein, 
that may remind us of writers in our own language. 
Indeed, an English influence is clearly discernible in 
some of the most eminent poets of this period, who 
have either visited Great Britain in person or made 
themselves familiar with its language.* The same in- 
fluence may be, perhaps, recognized in the moral com- 

* Among these may be mentioned Monti, Pindemonte, Cesarotti, 
Mazza, Alfieri, Pignotti, and Foscolo. 

44* 



522 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

plexion of many of their compositions, the most elegant 
specimen of which is probably Parini's satire, which 
disguises the sarcasm of Cowper in the rich, embroid- 
ered verse which belongs to the Italians. 

In looking back on the various branches of literature 
which we have been discussing, we are struck with the 
almost exclusive preference given to poetry over prose, 
with the great variety of beautiful forms which the 
former exhibits, with its finished versification, its inex- 
haustible inventions, and a wit that never tires. But 
in all this admirable mechanism we too often feel the 
want of an informing soul, of a nobler, or, at least, 
some more practical object than mere amusement. 
Their writers too rarely seem to feel 

" Divinity within them, breeding wings 
Wherewith to spurn the earth." 

They have gone beyond every other people in painting 
the intoxication of voluptuous passion ; but how rarely 
have they exhibited it in its purer and more ethereal 
form ! How rarely have they built up their dramatic 
or epic fables on national or patriotic recollections ! 
Even satire, disarmed of its moral sting, becomes in 
their hands a barren, though perhaps a brilliant, jest, 
— the harmless electricity of a summer sky. 

The peculiar inventions of a people best show their 
peculiar genius. The romantic epic has assumed with 
the Italians a perfectly original form, in which, stripped 
of the fond illusions of chivalry, it has descended, 
through all the gradations of mirth, from well-bred 
raillery to broad and bald buffoonery. In the same 
merry vein their various inventions in the burlesque 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 523 

style have been conceived. Whole cantos of these 
puerilities have been strung together with a patience 
altogether unrivalled except by that of their indefati- 
gable commentators.* Even the most austere intellects 
of the nation, a Machiavelli and a Galileo, for example, 
have not disdained to revel in this frivolous debauch 
of fancy, and may remind one of Michael Angelo, at 
the instance of Pietro de' Medici, employing his 
transcendent talents in sculpturing a perishable statue 
of snow ! 

The general scope of our vernacular literature, as 
contrasted with that of the Italian, will set the pecu- 
liarities of the latter in a still stronger light. In the 
English, the drama and the novel, which may be con- 
sidered as its staples, aiming at more than a vulgar in- 
terest, have always been made the theatre of a scientific 
dissection of character. Instead of the romping mer- 
riment of the novelle, it is furnished with those period- 
ical essays which, in the form of apologue, of serious 
disquisition or criticism, convey to us lessons of prac- 
tical wisdom. Its pictures of external nature have 
been deepened by a sober contemplation not familiar 
to the mercurial fancy of the Italians. Its biting sa- 
tire, from Pierce Plowman's Visions to the Baviad and 
Maeviad of our day, instead of breaking into vapid 
jests, has been sharpened against the follies or vices 
of the age, and the body of its poetry, in general, 
from the days of "moralle Gower" to those of Cowper 
and Wordsworth, breathes a spirit of piety and unsul- 
lied virtue. Even Spenser deemed it necessary to 

* The annotations upon Lippi's burlesque poem of the Malmantile 
Racquistata are inferior in bulk to those only on the Divine Comedy. 



5 2 4 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

shroud the eccentricities of his Italian imagination in 
sober allegory; and Milton, while he adopted in his 
Comus the beautiful and somewhat luxurious form of 
the Aminta and Pastor Fido, animated it with the most 
devotional sentiments. 

The political situation of Italy may afford a key to 
some of the peculiarities of her literature. Oppressed 
by foreign or domestic tyrants for more than five cen- 
turies, she has been condemned, in the indignant 
language of her poet, 

" Per servir sempre, o vincitrice o vinta." 

Her citizens, excluded from the higher walks of public 
action, have too often resigned themselves to corrupt 
and effeminate pleasure, and her writers, inhibited from 
the free discussion of important topics, have too' fre- 
quently contented themselves with an impotent play 
of fancy. The histories of Machiavelli and of Guic- 
ciardini were not permitted to be published entire 
until the conclusion of the last century. The writings 
of Alemanni, from some umbrage given to the Medici, 
were burned by the hands of the common hangman. 
Marchetti's elegant version of Lucretius was long pro- 
hibited on the ground of its epicurean philosophy, 
and the learned labors of Giannone were recompensed 
with exile. Under such a government, it is wonderful 
that so many rather than so few writers should have 
been found with intrepidity sufficient to raise the voice 
of unwelcome truth. It is not to be wondered at that 
they should have produced so few models of civil or 
sacred eloquence, the fruit of a happier and more en- 
lightened system ; that they should have been too ex- 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



5 2 5 



clusively devoted to mere beauties of form, have been 
more solicitous about style than thought, have studied 
rather to amuse than to instruct. Hence the super- 
abundance of their philological treatises and mere 
verbal criticisms, of their tomes of commentaries with 
which they have illustrated or obscured their most in- 
significant poets, where a verse furnishes matter for a 
lecture, and a canzone becomes the text for a volume. 
This is no exaggeration.* Hence, too, the frequency 
and ferocity of their literary quarrels, into which the 
Italians, excluded too often from weightier disquisi- 
tion, enter with an enthusiasm which in other nations 
can be roused only by the dearest interests of humanity. 
The comparative merit of some obscure classic, the 
orthography of some obsolete term, a simple sonnet, 
even, has been sufficient to throw the whole community 
into a ferment, in which the parties have not always 
confined themselves to a war of words. 

The influence of academies on Italian literature is 
somewhat doubtful. They have probably contributed 
to nourish that epicurean sensibility to mere verbal 
elegance so conspicuous in the nation. The great va- 
riety of these institutions scattered over every remote 
district of the country, the whimsicality of their titles, 
and still more of those of their members, have an air 
sufficiently ridiculous."}" Some of them have been de- 

*" Benedetto of Ravenna wrote ten lectures on the fourth sonnet 
of Petrarch ; Pico della Mirandola devoted three whole books to the 
illustration of a canzone of his friend Benivieni ; and three Arcadians 
published a volume in defence of the Tre Sorelle of Petrarch ! It 
would be easy to multiply similar examples of critical prodigality. 

"j* Take at hazard some of the most familiar, the "Ardent," the 
" Frozen," the " Wet," the " Dry," the " Stupid," the " Lazy." The 



52 6 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

voted to the investigation of science. But a license 
refused to individuals will hardly be conceded to pub- 
lic associations; and the persecution of some of the 
most eminent has proved an effectual warning to con- 
fine their speculations within the inoffensive sphere 
of literary criticism. Hence the exuberance of prose 
and lezioni, endless dissertations on barren rhetorical 
topics, and those vapid attempts at academic wit, 
which should never have transcended the bounds of 
the Lyceum. 

It is not in such institutions that the great intellec- 
tual efforts of a nation are displayed. All that any 
academy can propose to itself is to keep alive the 
flame which genius has kindled ; and in more than 
one instance they have gone near to smother it. The 
French Academy, as is well known, opened its career 
with its celebrated attack upon Corneille ; and the 
earliest attempt of the Cruscan was upon Tasso's Jeru- 
salem, which it compelled its author to remodel, or, in 
other words, to reduce, by the extraction of its essen- 
tial spirit, into a flat and insipid decoction. Denina 
has sarcastically intimated that the era of the founda- 
tion of this latter academy corresponds exactly with 
that of the commencement of the decline of good taste. 
More liberal critics concede, however, that this body 
lias done much to preserve the integrity of the tongue, 
and that a pure spirit of criticism was kept alive within 

Cruscan takes its name from Crusca (bran) ; and its members adopted 
the corresponding epithets of "brown bread," "white bread," "the 
kneaded," etc. Some of the Italians, as Lasca, La Bindo, for in- 
stance, are better known by their frivolous academic names than by 
their own. 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



5 2 7 



its bosom when it had become extinct in almost every 
other part of Italy.* Their philological labors have, 
in truth, been highly valuable, though perhaps not so 
completely successful as those of the French academi- 
cians. We do not allude to any capricious principle 
on which their vocabulary may have been constructed, 
— an affair of their own critics, — but to the fact that, 
after all, they have not been able to settle the language 
with the same precision and uniformity with which it 
has been done in France, from the want of some great 
metropolis, like Paris, whose authority would be re- 
ceived as paramount throughout the country. No such 
universal deference has been paid to the Cruscan acad- 
emy; and the Italian language, far from being accu- 
rately determined, is even too loose and inexact for 
the common purposes of business. Perhaps it is for 
this very reason better adapted to the ideal purposes 
of poetry. 

The exquisite mechanism of the Italian tongue, made 
up of the very elements of music, and picturesque in 
its formation beyond that of any other living language, 
is undoubtedly a cause of the exaggerated consequence 
imputed to style by the writers of the nation. The 
author of the Dialogue on Orators points out, as one 
of the symptoms of depraved eloquence in Rome, that 
"voluptuous artificial harmony of cadence, which is 
better suited to the purposes of the musician or the 
dancer than of the orator." The same vice has in- 
fected Italian prose from its earliest models, from 
Boccaccio and Bembo down to the most ordinary 

* See, in particular, the treatise of Parini, himself a Lombard, 
De' Principi delle Belle Lettere, part ii. cap. v. 



52 8 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

book-wright of the present day, who hopes to disguise 
his poverty of thought under his melodious redun- 
dancy of diction. Hence it is that their numerous 
Letters, Dialogues, and their specimens of written elo- 
quence are too often defective both in natural force and 
feeling. Even in those graver productions which de- 
rive almost their sole value from their facts, they are 
apt to be far more solicitous about style and ingenious 
turns of thought, as one of their own critics has ad- 
mitted, than either utility or sound philosophy.* 

A principal cause, after all, of the various pecu- 
liarities of Italian literature, of which we have been 
speaking, is to be traced to that fine perception of the 
beautiful, so inherent in every order of the nation, 
whether it proceed from a happier physical organiza- 
tion, or from an early familiarity with those models of 
ideal beauty by which they are everywhere surrounded. 
Whoever has visited Italy must have been struck with 
a sensibility to elegant pleasure, and a refinement of 
taste, in the very lowest classes, that in other countries 
belong only to the more cultivated. This is to be dis- 
cerned in the most trifling particulars; in their various 
costume, whose picturesque arrangement seems to have 
been studied from the models of ancient statuary ; in 
the flowers and other tasteful ornaments with which, 
on _/?/^-days, they decorate their chapels and public 
temples ; in the eagerness with which the peasant and 
the artisan, after their daily toil, resort to the theatre, 
the opera, or similar intellectual amusements, instead 
of the bear-baitings, bull-fights, and drunken orgies so 
familiar to the populace of other countries ; and in 

* Bettinelli, Risorgimento d'ltalia, Introd., p. 14. 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



5 2 9 



the quiet rapture with which they listen for hours, in 
the public squares, to the strains of an improvisatore 
or the recitations of a story-teller, without any other 
refreshment than a glass of water. Even the art of 
improvisation, carried to such perfection by the Ital- 
ians, is far less imputable to the facilities of their verse 
than to the poetical genius of the people ; an evidence 
of which is the abundance of i?nprovisatori in Latin in 
the sixteenth century, when that language came to be 
widely cultivated. 

It is time, however, to conclude our remarks, which 
have already encroached too liberally on the patience 
of our readers. Notwithstanding our sincere admira- 
tion, as generally expressed, for the beautiful literature 
of Italy, we fear that some of our reflections may be 
unpalatable to a people who shrink with sensitive deli- 
cacy from the rude touch of foreign criticism. The 
most liberal opinions of a foreigner, it is true, coming 
through so different a medium of prejudice and taste, 
must always present a somewhat distorted aspect to the 
eye of a native. On those finer shades of expression 
which constitute, indeed, much of the value of poetry, 
none but a native can pronounce with accuracy; but 
on its intellectual and moral character a foreign critic 
is better qualified to decide. He may be more perspi- 
cacious, even, than a native, in detecting those obli- 
quities from a correct standard of taste, to which the 
latter has been reconciled by prejudice and long ex- 
ample, or which he may have learned to reverence as 
beauties. 

There must be so many exceptions, too, to the 
sweeping range of any general criticism, that it will 
x 45 



53 o BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

always carry with it a certain air of injustice. Thus, 
while we object to the Italians the diluted, redundant 
style of their compositions, may they not refer us to 
their versions of Tacitus and Perseus, the most con- 
densed writers in the most condensed language in the 
world, in a form equally compact with that of the 
originals? May they not object to us Dante and 
Alfieri, scarcely capable of translation into any modern 
tongue, in the same compass, without a violence to 
idiom? And may they not cite the same hardy models 
in refutation of an unqualified charge of effeminacy? 
Where shall we find examples of purer and more ex- 
alted sentiment than in the writings of Petrarch and 
Tasso ? Where of a more chastised composition than 
in Casa or.Caro? And where more pertinent examples 
of a didactic aim than in their numerous poetical trea- 
tises on husbandry, manufactures, and other useful arts, 
which in other countries form the topics of bulky dis- 
quisitions in prose ? This is all just. But such ex- 
ceptions, however imposing, in no way contravene the 
general truth of our positions, founded on the preva- 
lent tone and characteristics of Italian literature. 

Let us not, however, appear insensible to the merits 
of a literature pre-eminent above all others for activity 
of fancy and beautiful variety of form, or to those of 
a country so fruitful in interesting recollections to the 
scholar and the artist ; in which the human mind has 
displayed" its highest energies untired through the 
longest series of ages ; on which the light of science 
shed its parting ray, and where it first broke again 
upon the nations; whose history is the link that con- 
nects the past with the present, the ancient with the 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



531 



modern, and whose enterprising genius enlarged the 
boundaries of the Old World by the discovery of a 
New; whose scholars opened to mankind the intellectual 
treasures of antiquity; whose schools first expounded 
those principles of law which have become the basis of 
jurisprudence in most of the civilized nations of Eu- 
rope; whose cities gave the earliest example of free in- 
stitutions, and, when the vision of liberty had passed 
away, maintained their empire over the mind by those 
admirable productions of art that revive the bright 
period of Grecian glory; and who, even now that her 
palaces are made desolate and her vineyards trodden 
down under the foot of the stranger, retains within her 
bosom all the fire of ancient genius. It would show a 
strange insensibility indeed did we not sympathize in 
the fortunes of a nation that has manifested, in such 
a variety of ways, the highest intellectual power; of 
which we may exclaim, in the language which a modern 
poet has applied to one of the most beautiful of her 

cities, 

" O Decus, O Lux 
Ausoniae, per quam libera turba sumus, 
Per quam Barbaries nobis non imperat, et Sol 
Exoriens nostro clarius orbe nitet!" 



SCOTTISH SONG.* 
i 

(July, 1826.) 

It is remarkable that poetry, which is esteemed so 
much more difficult than prose among cultivated 
people, should universally have been the form which 
man, in the primitive stages of society, has adopted 
for the easier development of his ideas. It may be 
that the infancy of nations, like that of individuals, is 
more taken up with imagination and sentiment than 
with reasoning, and is thus instinctively led to verse, 
as best suited, by its sweetness and harmony, to the 
expression of passionate thought. It may be, too, that 
the refinements of modern criticism have multiplied 
rather than relieved the difficulties of the art. The 
ancient poet poured forth his carmina incondita with 
no other ambition than that of accommodating" them 
to the natural music of his own ear, careless of the 
punctilious . observances which the fastidious taste of a 
polished age so peremptorily demands. However this 
may be, it is certain that poetry is more ancient than 
prose in the records of every nation, and that this 
poetry is found in its earliest stages almost always 
allied with music. Thus the Rhapsodies of Homer 

* " The Songs of Scotland, Ancient and Modern, with an Intro- 
duction and Notes, Historical and Critical, and the Characters of the 
Lyric Poets. By Allan Cunningham." In four volumes. London, 
1825. i2ino. 
(532) 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



533 



were chanted to the sound of the lyre by the wander- 
ing bards of Ionia; thus the citharoedi of the ancient 
Romans, the Welsh harper, the Saxon gleeman, the 
Scandinavian scald, and the Norman minstrel, soothed 
the sensual appetites of an unlettered age by the more 
exalted charms of poetry and music. This precocious 
poetical spirit seems to have been more widely diffused 
among the modern than the ancient European nations. 
The astonishing perfection of the Homeric epics makes 
it probable, it is true, that there must have been pre- 
viously a diligent cultivation of the divine art among 
the natives.* 

The introduction of the bards Phemius and Derao- 
docus into the Odyssey shows also that minstrelsy had 
long been familiar to Homer's countrymen. This, 
however, is but conjecture, as no undisputed fragments 
of this early age have come down to us. The Romans, 
we know, were not till a very late period moved by 
the impetus sacer. One or two devotional chants and 
a few ribald satires are all that claim to be antiquities 
in their prosaic literature. 

It was far otherwise with the nations of modern Eu- 
rope. Whether the romantic institutions of the age, 
or the warmth of classic literature not wholly extin- 
guished, awakened this general enthusiasm, we know 
not ; but no sooner had the thick darkness which for 
centuries had settled over the nations begun to dissi- 
pate, than the voice of song was heard in the remotest 
corners of Europe, where heathen civilization had never 
ventured, — from the frozen isles of Britain and Scandi- 

*" " Nee dubitari debet quin fuerint ante Homerum poetas." Cic., 
Brut., 18. 

45* 



534 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



navia, no less than from the fertile shores of Italy and 
Provence. We do not mean that the light of song was 
totally extinguished, even at the darkest period. It 
may be faintly discerned in the barbaric festivals of 
Attila, himself the theme of more than one venerable 
German romance ; and, at a later period, in the com- 
paratively refined courts of Alfred and Charlemagne. 

But it was not until the eleventh or twelfth century 
that refinement of taste was far advanced among the 
nations of Europe ; that, in spite of all the obstacles 
of a rude, unconcocted dialect, the foundations and 
the forms of their poetical literature were cast, which, 
with some modification, they have retained ever since. 
Of these, the ballads may be considered as coming 
more immediately from- the body o£ the people. In 
no country did they take such deep root as in Spain 
and Scotland, and, although cultivated more or less by 
all the Northern nations, yet nowhere else have they 
had the good fortune, by their own intrinsic beauty, 
and by the influence they have exerted over the popu- 
lar character, to constitute so important a part of the 
national literature. The causes of this are to be traced 
to the political relations of these countries. Spain, 
divided into a number of petty principalities, which 
contended with each other for pre-eminence, was 
obliged to carry on a far more desperate struggle for 
existence, as well as religion, with its Saracen in- 
vaders ; who, after advancing their victorious crescent 
from the Arabian desert to the foot of the Pyrenees, 
had established a solid empire over the fairest por- 
tions of the Peninsula. Seven long centuries was the 
ancient Spaniard reclaiming, inch by inch, this con- 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



535 



quered territory: thus a perpetual crusade was carried 
on, and the fertile fields of Andalusia and Granada 
became the mimic theatre of exploits similar to those 
performed by the martial enthusiasts of Europe, on a 
much greater scale, indeed, on the plains of Palestine. 
The effect of all this was to infuse into their popular 
compositions a sort of devotional heroism, which is to 
be looked for in vain in any other. The existence of 
the Cid so early as the eleventh century was a fortunate 
event for Spanish poetry. The authenticated actions 
of that chief are so nearly allied to the marvellous 
that, like Charlemagne, he forms a convenient nu- 
cleus for the manifold fictions in which successive 
bards have enveloped him. The ballads relating to 
this doughty hero have been collected into a sort of 
patchwork epic, whose fabrication thus resembles that 
imputed to those ancient poems which some modern 
critics have determined to be but a tissue of rhapsodies 
executed by different masters. But, without comparing 
them with the epics of Homer in symmetry of design 
or perfection of versification, we may reasonably claim 
for them a moral elevation not inferior, and a tone of 
courtesy and generous gallantry altogether unknown to 
the heroes of the Iliad. 

The most interesting of the Spanish ballads are those 
relating to the Moors. This people, now so degraded 
in every intellectual and moral aspect, were, as is well 
known, in the ninth and tenth centuries the principal 
depositaries of useful science and elegant art. This is 
particularly true of the Spanish caliphate ; and more 
than one Christian prelate is on record who, in a 
superstitious age, performed a literary pilgrimage to 



53^ 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



the schools of Cordova, and drank from these pro- 
fane sources of wisdom. The peculiarities of Oriental 
costume, their showy military exercises, their perilous 
bull-feasts and cane-fights, their chivalric defiance and 
rencounters with the Christian knights on the plains 
before the assembled city, their brilliant revels, ro- 
mantic wooings, and midnight serenades, afforded rich 
themes for the muse ; above all, the capture and deso- 
lation of Granada, that "city without peer," the 
"pride of heathendom," on which the taste and 
treasures of the Western caliphs had been lavished 
for seven centuries, are detailed in a tone of melan- 
choly grandeur, which comes over us like the voice of 
an expiring" nation.* 

One trait has been pointed out in these poems most 
honorable to the Spanish character, and in which, in 
later times, it has been lamentably deficient, that of 
religious toleration : we find none of the fierce bigotry 
which armed the iron hand of the Inquisition ; which 
coolly condemned to exile or the stake a numerous 
native population for an honest difference of religious 
opinion, and desolated with fire and sword the most 
flourishing of their Christian provinces. 

The ancient Spaniard, on the contrary, influenced 

* An ancient Arabian writer concludes a florid eulogium on the ar- 
chitecture and local beauties of Granada in the fourteenth century, 
with likening it, in Oriental fashion, to " a richly-wrought vase of 
silver, filled with jacinths and emeralds." (Historia de los Arabes de 
Espaha, torn. iii. p. 147.) Among the ballads relating to the Moorish 
wars, two of the most beautiful are the " Lament over Alhama," in- 
differently translated by Byron, and that beginning with " En la 
ciudad de Granada," rendered by Lockhart with his usual freedom 
and vivacity. Hita, i. 464, and Depping, 240. 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



537 



by a more enlightened policy, as well as by humanity, 
contracted familiar intimacies, nay, even matrimonial 
alliances, with his Mohammedan rivals, and the proud- 
est of their nobles did not disdain, in an honest cause, 
to fight under the banners of the Infidel. It would 
be a curious study to trace the progress and the causes 
of this pitiable revolution in national feeling. 

The Spaniards have good reason to cherish their 
ancient ballads, for nowhere is the high Castilian 
character displayed to such advantage, — haughty, it 
is true, jealous of insult, and without the tincture of 
letters which throws a lustre over the polished court of 
Charles and Philip, but also without the avarice, the 
insatiable cruelty, and dismal superstition which deface 
the bright page of their military renown.* The Cid 
himself, whose authentic history may vindicate the 
hyperbole of romance, was the beau ideal of chivalry. f 

* Sufficient evidence of this may be found in works of imagination, 
as well as the histories of the period. The plays of Lope de Vega, 
for instance, are filled with all manner of perfidy and assassination, 
which takes place as a matter of course, and without the least com- 
punction. In the same spirit, the barbarous excesses of his country- 
men in South America are detailed by Ercilla, in his historical epic, 
La Araucana. The flimsy pretext of conscience, for which these 
crimes are perpetrated, cannot veil their enormity from any but the 
eyes of the offender. 

f The veracity of the traditionary history of the Cid, indeed, his 
existence, discussed and denied by Masdeu, in his Historia critica de 
Espaha, has been satisfactorily established by the learned Miiiler ; 
and the conclusions of the latter writer are recently confirmed by 
Conde's posthumous publication of translated Arabian manuscripts 
of great antiquity, where the Cid is repeatedly mentioned as the chief 
known by the name of the Warrior, el Campeador : " the Cid whom 
Alia curse;" "the tyrant Cid;" "the accursed Cid," etc. See His- 
toria de los Arabes de Espafia, ii. 92. 
X* 



538 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



The peculiarities of early Scottish poetry may also 
be referred, in a great degree, to the political relations 
of the nation, which for many centuries was distracted 
by all the rancorous dissensions incident to the ill- 
balanced fabric of feudal government. The frequent 
and long regencies, always unfavorable to civil con- 
cord, multiplied the sources of jealousy, and armed 
with new powers the factious aristocracy. In the ab- 
sence of legitimate authority, each baron sought to 
fortify himself by the increased number of his re- 
tainers, who, in their turn, willingly attached them- 
selves to the fortunes of a chief who secured to them 
plunder and protection. Hence a system of clanship 
was organized, more perfect and more durable than 
has existed in any other country, which is not entirely 
effaced at the present day. To the nobles who garri- 
soned the Marches, still greater military powers were 
necessarily delegated for purposes of state defence, 
and the names of Home, Douglas, and Buccleuch make 
a far more frequent and important figure in national 
history than that of the reigning sovereign. Hence 
private feuds were inflamed and vindicated by national 
antipathies, and a pretext of patriotism was never 
wanting to justify perpetual hostility. Hence the 
scene of the old ballads was laid chiefly on the borders, 
and hence the minstrels of the "North Countrie" ob- 
tained such pre-eminence over their musical brethren. 

The odious passion of revenge, which seems adapted 
by nature to the ardent temperaments of the South, 
but which even there has been mitigated by the spirit 
of Christianity, glowed with fierce heat in the bosoms 
of those Northern savages. An offence to the meanest 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 539 

individual was espoused by his whole clan, and was 
expiated, not by the blood of the offender only, but 
by that of his whole kindred. The sack of a peaceful 
castle and the slaughter of its sleeping inhabitants 
seem to have been as familiar occurrences to these 
Border heroes as the lifting of a drove of cattle, and 
attended with as little compunction. The following 
pious invocation, uttered on the eve of an approaching 
foray, may show the acuteness of their moral sensi- 
bility : 

" He that ordained us to be born 
Sent us mair meat for the morn. 
Come by right or come by wrang, 
Christ, let us not fast owre lang, 
But blithely spend what's gaily got. 
Ride, Rowland, hough 's i' the pot." 

When superstition usurps the place of religion, there 
will be little morality among the people. The only 
law they knew was the command of their chief, and 
the only one he admitted was his sword. " By what 
right," said a Scottish prince to a marauding Douglas, 
"do you hold these lands?" " By that of my sword," 
he answered. 

From these causes the early Scottish poetry is deeply 
tinged with a gloomy ferocity, and abounds in details 
of cool, deliberate cruelty. It is true that this is fre- 
quently set off, as in the fine old ballads of Chevy 
Chase and Auld Mai Hand, by such deeds of rude but 
heroic gallantry as, in the words of Sidney, "stir the 
soul like the sound of a trumpet." But, on the whole, 
although the scene of the oldest ballads is pitched as 
late as the fourteenth century, the manners they ex- 



54o 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



hibit are not much superior, in point of refinement 
and humanity, to those of our own North American 



savages.* 



From wanton or vindictive cruelty, especially when 
exercised on the defenceless or the innocent, the culti- 
vated mind naturally shrinks with horror and disgust: 
but it was long ere the stern hearts of our English 
ancestors yielded to the soft impulses of mercy and 
benevolence. The reigns of the Norman dynasty are 
written in characters of fire and blood. As late as 
the conclusion of the fourteenth century, we find the 
Black Prince, the "flower of English knighthood," 
as Froissart styles him, superintending the butchery of 
three thousand unresisting captives, men, women, and 
children, who vainly clung to him for mercy. The 
general usage of surrendering as hostages their wives 
and children, whose members were mutilated or lives 
sacrificed on the least infraction of their engagements, 
is a still better evidence of the universal barbarism of 
the so-much lauded age of chivalry. 

Another trait in the old Scotch poetry, and of a very 
opposite nature from that we have been describing, is 
its occasional sensibility: touches of genuine pathos 
are found scattered among the cold, appalling passions 
of the age, like the flowers which, in Switzerland, are 
said to bloom alongside the avalanche. No state of 
society is so rude as to extinguish the spark of natural 
affection ; tenderness for our offspring is but a more 

* For proof of this assertion, see " Minstrelsy of the Scottish Bor- 
der," and in particular the ballads of "Jellon Grame," "Young Ben- 
jie," " Lord William,' " Duel of Wharton and Stuart," " Death of 
Featherstonehaugh," " Douglas Tragedy," etc. 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



541 



enlarged selfishness, perfectly compatible with the ut- 
most ferocity towards others. Hence scenes of parental 
and filial attachment are to be met with in these poems 
which cannot be read without emotion. The passion 
of love appears to have been a favorite study with the 
ancient English writers, and by none,, in any language 
we have read, is it managed with so much art and feel- 
ing as by the dramatic writers of Queen Elizabeth's 
day. The Scottish minstrels, with less art, seem to be 
entitled to the praise of possessing an equal share of 
tenderness. In the Spanish ballad love glows with the 
fierce ardor of a tropical sun. The amorous serenader 
celebrates the beauties of his Zayda (the name which, 
from its frequency, would seem to be a general title 
for a Spanish mistress) in all the florid hyperbole of 
Oriental gallantry, or, as a disappointed lover, wanders 
along the banks of the Guadalete, imprecating curses 
on her head and vengeance on his devoted rival. The 
calm dejection and tender melancholy which are dif- 
fused over the Scottish love-songs are far more affect- 
ing than all this turbulence of passion. The sensibility 
which, even in a rude age, seems to have characterized 
the Scottish maiden, was doubtless nourished by the 
solemn complexion of the scenery by which she was 
surrounded, by the sympathies continually awakened 
for her lover in his career of peril and adventure, and 
by the facilities afforded her for brooding over her 
misfortunes in the silence of rural solitude. 

To similar physical causes may be principally re- 
ferred those superstitions which are so liberally diffused 
over the poetry of Scotland down to the present day. 
The tendency of wild, solitary districts, darkened with 

46 



542 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



mountains and extensive forests, to raise in the mind 
ideas of solemn, preternatural awe, has been noticed 
from the earliest ages. "Where is a lofty and deeply- 
shaded grove," writes Seneca, in one of his epistles, 
"filled with venerable trees, whose interlacing boughs 
shut out the face of heaven, the grandeur of the wood, 
the silence of the place, the shade so dense and uni- 
form, infuse into the breast the notion of a divinity;" 
and thus the speculative fancy of the ancients, always 
ready to supply the apparent void of nature, garrisoned 
each grove, fountain, or grotto with some local and 
tutelary genius. These sylvan deities, clothed with 
corporeal figures and endowed with mortal appetites, 
were brought near to the level of humanity; but the 
Christian revelation, which assures us of another world, 
is the "evidence of things unseen," and, while it dis- 
sipates the gross and sensible creations of classic my- 
thology, raises our conceptions to the spiritual and the 
infinite. In our eager thirst for communication with 
the world of spirits, we naturally imagine it can only 
be through the medium of spirits like themselves, and, 
in the vulgar creed, these apparitions never come from 
the abodes of the blessed, but from the tomb, where 
they are supposed to await the period of a final and 
universal resurrection, and whence they are allowed to 
"revisit the glimpses of the moon," for penance or 
some other inscrutable purpose. Hence the gloomy, 
undefined character of the modern apparition is much 
more appalling than the sensual and social personifica- 
tions of antiquity. 

The natural phenomena of a wild, uncultivated coun- 
try greatly conspire to promote the illusions of the 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



543 



fancy. The power of clouds to reflect, to distort, and 
to magnify objects is well known, and on this principle 
many of the preternatural appearances in the German 
mountains and the Scottish Highlands, whose lofty 
summits and unreclaimed valleys are shrouded in 
clouds and exhalations, have been ingeniously and 
philosophically explained. The solitary peasant, as 
the shades of evening close around him, witnesses 
with dismay the gathering phantoms, and, hurrying 
home, retails his adventures with due amplification. 
What is easily believed is easily seen, and the marvel- 
lous incident is soon placed beyond dispute by a mul- 
titude of testimonies. The appetite, once excited, is 
keen in detecting other visions and prognostics, which 
as speedily circulate through the channels of rustic 
tradition, until in time each glen and solitary heath 
has its unearthly visitants, each family its omen or 
boding spectre, and superstition, systematized into a 
science, is expounded by indoctrinated wizards and 
gifted seers. 

In addition to these fancies, common, though in a 
less degree, to other nations, the inhabitants of the 
North have inherited a more material mythology, 
which has survived the elegant fictions of Greece and 
Rome, either because it was not deemed of sufficient 
importance to provoke the arm of the Church, or be- 
cause it was too nearly accommodated to the moral 
constitution of the people to be thus easily eradicated. 
The character of a mythology is always intimately con- 
nected with that of the scenery and climate in which 
it is invented. Thus the graceful Nymphs and Naiads 
of Greece, the Peris of Persia, who live in the colors 



544 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



of the rainbow and on the odors of flowers, the Fairies 
of England, who in airy circles "dance their ringlets 
to the whistling wind," have the frail gossamer forms 
and delicate functions congenial with the' beautiful 
countries which they inhabit; while the Elves, Bogles, 
Brownies, and Kelpies, which seem to have legiti- 
mately descended, in ancient Highland verse, from 
the Scandinavian Dvergar, Nisser, etc., are of a stunted 
and malignant aspect, and are celebrated for nothing 
better than maiming cattle, bewildering the benighted 
traveller, and conjuring out the souls of new-born in- 
fants. Within the memory of the present generation, 
very well authenticated anecdotes of these ghostly kid- 
nappers have been circulated and greedily credited in 
the Scottish Highlands. But the sunshine of civiliza- 
tion is rapidly dispelling the lingering mists of super- 
stition. The spirits of darkness love not the cheerful 
haunts of men, and the bustling activity of an in- 
creasing, industrious population allows brief space for 
the fears or inventions of fancy. 

The fierce aspect of the Scottish ballad was miti- 
gated under the general tranquillity which followed the 
accession of James to the united crowns of England 
and Scotland, and the Northern muse might have 
caught some of the inspiration which fired her South- 
ern sister at this remarkable epoch, had not the fatal 
prejudices of her sovereign in favor of an English or 
even a Latin idiom diverted his ancient subjects from 
the cultivation of their own. As it was, Drummond 
of Hawthornden, whose melodious and melancholy 
strains, however, are to be enrolled among English 
verse, is the most eminent name which adorns the 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 545 

scanty annals of this reign. The civil and religious 
broils, which, by the sharp concussion they gave to 
the English intellect during the remainder of this un- 
happy century, seemed to have forced out every latent 
spark of genius, served only to discourage the less pol- 
ished muse of the North. The austerity of the Re- 
formers chilled the sweet flow of social song, and the 
only verse in vogue was a kind of rude satire, some- 
times pointed at the licentiousness of the Roman 
clergy, and sometimes at the formal affectation of the 
Puritans, but which, from the coarseness of the execu- 
tion, and # the transitory interest of its topics, has for 
the most part been consigned to a decent oblivion. 

The Revolution in 1688, and the subsequent union 
of the two kingdoms, by the permanent assurance 
they gave of civil and religious liberty, and, lastly, 
the establishment of parochial schools about the same 
period, by that wide diffusion of intelligence among 
the lower orders which has elevated them above every 
other European peasantry, had a most sensible influ- 
ence on the moral and intellectual progress of the 
nation. Improvements in art and agriculture were 
introduced ; the circle of ideas was expanded and the 
feelings liberalized by a free communication with their 
southern neighbors ; and religion, resigning much of 
her austerity, lent a prudent sanction to the hilarity 
of social intercourse. Popular poetry naturally reflects 
the habits and prevailing sentiments of a nation. The 
ancient notes of the border trumpet were exchanged 
for the cheerful sounds of rustic revelry; and the sen- 
sibility which used to be exhausted on subjects of 
acute but painful interest now celebrated the temperate 

46* 



546 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



pleasures of domestic happiness and rational though 
romantic love. 

The rustic glee which had put such mettle into the 
compositions of James the First and Fifth, those royal 
poets of the commonalty, as they have been aptly 
styled, was again renewed ; ancient songs, purified 
from their original vices of sentiment or diction, were 
revived ; new ones were accommodated to ancient 
melodies ; and a revolution was gradually effected in 
Scottish verse, which experienced little variation during 
the remainder of the eighteenth century. The existence 
of a national music is essential to the entire success of 
lyrical poetry. It may be said, indeed, to give wings 
to song, which, in spite of its imperfections, is thus 
borne along from one extremity of the nation to the 
other, with a rapidity denied to many a nobler com- 
position. 

Thus allied, verse not only represents the present, 
but the past; and, while it invites us to repose or to 
honorable action, its tones speak of joys which are 
gone, or wake in us the recollections of ancient glory. 

It is impossible to trace the authors of a large por- 
tion of the popular lyrics of Scotland, which, like its 
native wild flowers, seem to have sprung up spon- 
taneously in the most sequestered solitudes of the 
country. Many of these poets, even, who are familiar 
in the mouths of their own countrymen, are better 
known south of the Tweed by the compositions which, 
under the title of "Scottish Melodies," are diligently 
thrummed by every miss in her teens, than by their 
names ; while some few others, as Ramsay, Ferguson, 
etc., whose independent tomes maintain higher reputa- 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



547 



tion, are better known by their names than their com- 
positions, which, much applauded, are, we suspect, but 
little read. 

The union of Scotland with England was unpro- 
pitious to the language of the former country; at least 
it prevented it from attaining a classical perfection, 
which some, perhaps, may not regret, as being in its 
present state a better vehicle for the popular poetry 
so consonant with the genius of the nation. Under 
Edward the First the two nations spoke the same lan- 
guage, and the formidable epics of Barbour and Blind 
Harry, his contemporaries, are cited by Warton as 
superior models of English versification. After the 
lapse of five centuries, the Scottish idiom retains a 
much greater affinity with the original stock than does 
the English ; but the universal habit with the Scotch of 
employing the latter in works of taste or science, and 
of relinquishing their own idiom to the more humble 
uses of the people, has degraded it to the unmerited 
condition of a provincial dialect. Few persons care to 
bestow much time in deciphering a vocabulary which 
conceals no other treasures than those of popular fancy 
and tradition. 

A genius like Burns certainly may do, and doubtless 
has done, much to diffuse a knowledge and a relish for 
his native idiom. His character as a poet has been too 
often canvassed by writers and biographers to require 
our panegyric. We define it, perhaps, as concisely 
as may be, by saying that it consisted of an acute 
sensibility regulated by uncommon intellectual vigor. 
Hence his frequent visions of rustic love and court- 
ship never sink into mawkish sentimentality, his quiet 



548 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



pictures of domestic life are without insipidity, and his 
mirth is not the unmeaning ebullition of animal spirits, 
but is pointed with the reflection of a keen observer 
of human nature. This latter talent, less applauded 
in him than some others, is in our opinion his most 
eminent. Without the grace of I^a Fontaine, or the 
broad buffoonery of Berni, he displays the same facility 
of illuminating the meanest topics, seasons his humor 
with as shrewd a moral, and surpasses both in a gener- 
ous sensibility which gives an air of truth and cor- 
diality to all his sentiments. Lyrical poetry admits of 
less variety than any other species; and Burns, from 
this circumstance, as well as from the flexibility of his 
talents, may be considered as the representative of his 
whole nation. Indeed, his universal genius seems to 
have concentrated within itself the rays which were 
scattered among his predecessors, — the simple tender- 
ness of Crawford, the fidelity of Ramsay, and careless 
humor of Ferguson. The Doric dialect of his country 
was an instrument peculiarly fitted for the expression 
of his manly and unsophisticated sentiments. But no 
one is more indebted to the national music than Burns: 
embalmed in the sacred melody, his songs are familiar 
to us from childhood, and, as we read them, the silver 
sounds with which they have been united seem to 
linger in our memory, heightening and prolonging the 
emotions which the sentiments have excited. 

Mr. Cunningham, to whom it is high time we should 
turn, in some prefatory reflections on the condition of 
Scottish poetry, laments exceedingly the improvements 
in agriculture and mechanics, the multiplication of 
pursuits, the wider expansion of knowledge, which 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



549 



have taken place among the peasantry of Scotland 
during the present century. 

''Change of condition, increase of knowledge," 
says he, "the calling in of machinery to the aid of 
human labor, and the ships which whiten the ocean 
with their passing and repassing sails, wafting luxuries 
to our backs and our tables, are all matters of delight 
to the historian or the politician, but of sorrow to the 
poet, who delights in the primitive glory of a people, 
and contemplates with pain all changes which lessen 
the original vigor of character and refine mankind till 
they become too sensitive for enjoyment. Man has 
now to labor harder and longer to shape out new ways 
to riches, and even bread, and feel the sorrows of the 
primeval curse, a hot and sweaty brow, more frequently 
and more severely than his ancestors. All this is un- 
congenial to the creation of song, where many of our 
finest songs have been created, and to its enjoyment, 
where it was long and fondly enjoyed, among the 
peasantry of Scotland." — Preface. 

These circumstances certainly will be a matter of 
delight to the historian and politician, and we doubt 
if they afford any reasonable cause of lamentation to 
the poet. An age of rudeness and ignorance is not 
the most propitious to a flourishing condition of the 
art, which indulges quite as much in visions of the past 
as the present, in recollections as in existing occupa- 
tions ; and this is not only true of civilized, but of 
ruder ages : the forgotten bards of the Niebelungen 
and the Heldenbuch, of the romances of Arthur and 
of Charlemagne, looked back through the vista of 
seven hundred years for their subjects, and the earliest 



55 o BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

of the Border minstrelsy celebrates the antique feuds 
of a preceding century. On the other hand, a wider 
acquaintance with speculative and active concerns may 
be thought to open a bolder range of ideas and illus- 
trations to the poet. Examples of this may be dis- 
cerned among the Scottish poets of the present age ; 
and if the most eminent, as Scott, Campbell, Joanna 
Baillie, have deserted their natural dialect and the 
humble themes of popular interest for others better 
suited to their aspiring genius, and for a language 
which could diffuse and perpetuate their compositions, 
it can hardly be matter for serious reproach even 
with their own countrymen. But this is not true of 
Scott, who has always condescended to illuminate the 
most rugged and the meanest topics relating to his own 
nation, and who has revived in his "'Minstrelsy" not 
merely the costume but the spirit of the ancient Border 
muse of love and chivalry. 

In a similar tone of lamentation, Mr. Cunningham 
deprecates the untimely decay of superstition through- 
out the land. But the seeds of superstition are not 
thus easily eradicated: its grosser illusions, indeed, 
may, as we have before said, be scattered by the in- 
creasing light of science ; but the principal difference 
between a rude and a civilized age, at least as regards 
poetical fiction, is that the latter requires more skill and 
plausibility in working up the materiel than the former. 
The witches of Macbeth are drawn too broadly to im- 
pose on the modern spectator, as they probably did on 
the credulous age of Queen Bess; but the apparition 
in Job, or the Bodach Glass in Waverley, is shadowed 
with a dim and mysterious portraiture that inspires a 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



55* 



solemn interest sufficient for the purposes of poetry. 
The philosophic mind may smile with contempt at 
popular fancies, convinced that the general experience 
of mankind contradicts the existence of apparitions ; 
that the narratives of them are vague and ill authenti- 
cated ; that they never or rarely appeal to more than 
one sense, and that the most open to illusion ; that 
they appear only in moments of excitement and in 
seasons of solitude and obscurity; that they come for 
no explicable purpose and effect no perceptible result ; 
and that, therefore, they may in every case be safely 
imputed to a diseased or a deluded imagination. But 
if, in the midst of these solemn musings, our philoso- 
pher's candle should chance to go out, it is not quite 
certain that he would continue to pursue them with the 
same stoical serenity. In short, no man is quite so 
much a hero in the dark as in broad daylight, in soli- 
tude as in society, in the gloom of the churchyard as 
in the blaze of the drawing-room. The season and 
the place may be such as to oppress the stoutest heart 
with a mysterious awe, which, if not fear, is near akin 
to it. We read of adventurous travellers who through 
a sleepless night have defied the perilous nonentities of 
a haunted chamber, and the very interest we take in 
their exploits proves that the superstitious principle is 
not wholly extinguished in our own bosoms. So, in- 
deed, do the mysterious inventions of Mrs. Radcliffe 
and her ghostly school; of our own Brown, in a most 
especial manner ; and Scott, ever anxious to exhibit 
the speculative as well as practical character of his 
countrymen, has more than once appealed to the same 
general principle. Doubtless few in this enlightened 



55 2 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

age are disposed boldly to admit the existence of these 
spiritual phenomena; but fewer still there are who 
have not enough of superstitious feeling lurking in 
their bosoms for all the purposes of poetical interest. 

Mr. Cunningham's work consists of four volumes of 
lyrics, in a descending series from the days of Queen 
Mary to our own. The more ancient, after the fashion 
of Burns and Ramsay, he has varnished over with a 
coloring of diction that gives greater lustre to their 
faded beauties, occasionally restoring a mutilated mem- 
ber which time and oblivion had devoured. Our au- 
thor's prose, consisting of a copious preface and critical 
notices, is both florid and pedantic; it continually 
aspires to the vicious affectation of poetry, and explains 
the most common sentiments by a host of illustrations 
and images, thus perpetually reminding us of the chil- 
dren's play of "What is it like ?" As a poet, his fame 
has long been established, and the few original pieces 
which he has introduced into the present collection 
have the ease and natural vivacity conspicuous in his 
former compositions. We will quote one or two, 
which we presume are the least familiar to our readers: 

" A wet sheet and a flowing sea r 

A wind that follows fast, 
And fills the white and rustling sail, 

And bends the gallant mast ! 
And bends the gallant mast, my boys, 

While, like the eagle free, 
Away the good ship flies, and leaves 

Old England on the lee. 

" Oh for a soft and gentle wind ! 
I heard a fair one cry ; , 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 553 

But give to me the swelling breeze, 

And white waves heaving high ; 
And white waves heaving high, my lads, 

The good ship tight and free ; 
The world of waters is our home, 

And merry men are we. 

" There's tempest in yon horned moon, 

And lightning in yon cloud ; 
And hark the music, mariners ! 

The wind is wakening loud. 
The wind is wakening loud, my boys, 

The lightning flashes free ; 
The hollow oak our palace is, 

Our heritage the sea." — Vol. iv. p. 208. 

This spirited water-piece, worthy of Campbell, is 
one evidence among others of the tendency of the 
present improved condition of the Scottish peasantry 
to expand the beaten circle of poetical topics and illus- 
trations. The following is as pretty a piece of fairy 
gossamer as has been spun out of this skeptical age : 

"SONG OF THE ELFIN MILLER. 

" Full merrily rings the millstone round, 

Full merrily rings the wheel, 
Full merrily gushes out the grist, — 

Come, taste my fragrant meal. 
As sends the lift its snowy drift, 

So the meal comes in a shower ; 
Work, fairies, fast, for time flies past, — 

I borrow'd the mill an hour. 

" The miller he's a worldly man, 
And maun hae double fee ; 
So draw the sluice of the churl's dam, 

And let the stream come free. 
Shout, fairies, shout ! see, gushing out, 
The meal comes like a river ; 
Y 47 



554 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

The top of the grain on hill and plain 
Is ours, and shall be ever. 

" One elf goes chasing the wild bat's wing, 

And one the white owl's horn ; 
One hunts the fox for the white o' his tail, 

And we winna hae him till morn. 
One idle fay, with the glow-worm's ray, 

Runs glimmering 'mang the mosses ; 
Another goes tramp wi' the will-o-wisp's lamp, 

To light a lad to the lasses. 

" O haste, my brown elf, bring me corn 

From bonnie Blackwood plains ; 
Go, gentle fairy, bring me grain 

From green Dalgonar mains ; 
But, pride of a' at Closeburn ha', 

Fair is the corn and fatter; 
Taste, fairies, taste, a gallanter grist 

Has never been wet with water. 

" Hilloah ! my hopper is heaped high ; 

Hark to the well-hung wheels ! 
They sing for joy ; the dusty roof 

It clatters and it reels. 
Haste, elves, and turn yon mountain burn — ■ 

Bring streams that shine like siller ; 
The dam is down, the moon sinks soon, 

And I maun grind my meller. 

" Ha! bravely done, my wanton elves! 

That is a foaming stream ; 
See how the dust from the mill-ee flies, 

And chokes the cold moonbeam. 
Haste, fairies fleet, come baptized feet, 

Come sack and sweep up clean, 
And meet me soon, ere sinks the moon, 

In thy green vale, Dalveen." — Vol. iv. p. 327. 

The last we can afford is a sweet, amorous effusion, 
in the best style of the romantic muse of the Lowlands. 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 555 

It has before found a place in the " Nithsdale and 
Galloway" collection: 

" Thou hast vow'd by thy faith, my Jeanie, 

By that pretty white hand of thine, 
And by all the lowing stars in heaven, 

That thou wouldst aye be mine ; 
And I have sworn by my faith, my Jeanie, 

And by that kind heart of thine, 
By all the stars sown thick o'er heaven, 

That thou shalt aye be mine. 

" Foul fa' the hands wad loose sic bands, 

And the heart wad part sic love ; 
But there's nae hand can loose the band 

But the finger of Him above. 
Though the wee wee cot maun be my bield, 

And my clothing e'er sae mean, 
I should lap me up rich in the faulds of love 

Heaven's armfu' of my Jean. 

" Thy white arm wad be a pillow to me, 

Far softer than the down, 
And Love wad winnow o'er us his kind, kind wings, 

And sweetly we'd sleep and soun'. 
Come here to me, thou lass whom I love, 

Come here and kneel wi' me, 
The morning is full of the presence of God, 

And I cannot pray but thee. 

" The wind is sweet amang the new flowers, 

The wee birds sing saft on the tree, 
Our goodman sits in the bonnie sunshine, 

And a blithe old bodie is he ; 
The Beuk maun be ta'en when he comes hame, 

Wi' the holie psalmodie, 
And I will speak of thee when I pray, 

And thou maun speak of me." — Vol. iv. p. 308. 

Our readers may think we have been detained too 
long by so humble a theme as old songs and ballads ; 



556 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

yet a wise man has said, " Give me the making of the 
ballads, and I care not who makes the laws of a na- 
tion." Indeed, they will not be lightly regarded by 
those who consider their influence on the character of 
a simple, susceptible people, particularly in a rude age, 
when they constitute the authentic records of national 
history. Thus the wandering minstrel kindles in his 
unlettered audience a generous emulation of the deeds 
of their ancestors, and while he sings the bloody feuds 
of the Zegris and Abencerrages, the Percy and the 
Douglas, artfully fans the flame of an expiring hos- 
tility. Under these animating influences, the ancient 
Spaniard and the Border warrior displayed that stern 
military enthusiasm which distinguished them above 
every other peasantry in Europe. Nor is this influence 
altogether extinguished in a polite age, when the nar- 
row attachments of feudal servitude are ripened into a 
more expanded patriotism ; the generous principle is 
nourished and invigorated in the patriot by the simple 
strains which recount the honorable toils, the homebred 
joys, the pastoral adventures, the romantic scenery, 
which have endeared to him the land of his fathers. 
There is no moral cause which operates more strongly 
in infusing a love of country into the mass of the 
people than the union of a national music with popular 
poetry. 

But these productions have an additional value in 
the eyes of the antiquarian to what is derived from 
their moral or political influence, as the repertory of 
the motley traditions and superstitions that have de- 
scended for ages through the various races of the North. 
The researches of modern scholars have discovered a 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 557 

surprising affinity between the ancient Scottish ballad 
and the Teutonic, Scandinavian, and even Calmuck 
romance. Some of the most eminent of the old Border 
legends are almost literal versions of those which in- 
flamed the martial ardor of our Danish ancestors.* 
A fainter relationship had before been detected be- 
tween them and Southern and Oriental fable. Thus, 
in a barbarous age, when the nearest provinces of Eu- 
rope had but a distant intercourse with each other, the 
electric spark of fancy seems to have run around the 
circle of the remotest regions, animating them with 
the same wild and original creations. 

Even the lore of the nursery may sometimes ascend to 
as high an antiquity. The celebrated Whittington and 
his Cat can display a Teutonic pedigree of more than 
eight centuries; "Jack, commonly called the Giant- 
Killer, and Thomas Thumb," says an antiquarian 
writer, "landed in England from the very same keels 
and war-ships which conveyed Hengist and Horsa, and 
Ebba the Saxon;" and the nursery-maid who chants 
the friendly monition to the "Lady-bird," or narrates 
the "fee-faw-fum" adventure of the carnivorous giant, 
little thinks she has purloined the stores of Teutonic 
song and Scandinavian mythology. \ The ingenious 

* Such are "The Childe of Elle," "Catharine and Janfarie," 
" Cospatric," " Willie's Lady," etc. 

f " Lady-bird, lady-bird, fly away home, 

Your house is on fire, your children will roam." 

This fragment of a respectable little poem has soothed the slumbers 
of the German infant for many ages. The giant who so cunningly 
scented the " blood of an Englishman" is the counterpart of the per- 
sonage recorded in the collection of Icelandic mythology made by 
Snorro in the thirteenth century. Edda, Fabl 23. 

47* 



558 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



Blanco White, who, under the name of Doblado, has 
thrown great light on the character and condition of 
modern Spain, has devoted a chapter to tracing out the 
genealogies of the games and popular pastimes of his 
country. Something of the same kind might be at- 
tempted in. the untrodden walks of nursery literature. 
Ignorance and youth are satisfied at no great cost of 
invention. The legend of one generation answers, 
with little variation, for the next, and, within the pre- 
cincts of the nursery, obtains that imperishable exist- 
ence which has been the vain boast of many a loftier 
lyric. That the mythology of one age should be aban- 
doned to the "Juvenile Cabinet" of another, is indeed 
curious. Thus the doctrines most venerated by man 
in the infancy of society become the sport of infants 
in an age of civilization, furnishing a pleasing example 
of the progress of the human intellect, and a plausible 
coloring for the dream of perfectibility. 



DA PONTE'S OBSERVATIONS.* 

(July, 1825.) 

The larger part of the above work is devoted to 
strictures upon an article on "Italian Narrative Po- 
etry," which appeared in October, 1824. The author 
is an eminent Italian teacher at New York. His poet- 
ical abilities have been highly applauded in his own 
country, and were rewarded with the office of Csesarean 
poet at the court of Vienna, where he acquired new 
laurels as successor to the celebrated Metastasio. His 
various fortunes in literary and fashionable life while 
in Europe, and the eccentricities of his enthusiastic 
character, furnish many interesting incidents for an 
autobiography published by him two years since at 
New York, and to this we refer those of our readers 
who are desirous of a more intimate acquaintance with 
the author. 

We regret that our remarks, which appeared to us 
abundantly encomiastic of Italian letters, and which 
certainly proceeded from our admiration for them, 
should have given such deep offence to the respectable 
author of the Osservazioni as to compel him, although 
a "veteran" in literature, to arm himself against us in 
defence of his "calumniated" country. According to 

* " Alcune Osservazioni sull' Articulo Quarto publicato nel North 
American Review, il Mese d'Ottobre dell' Anno 1824. Da L. Da 
Ponte. Nuova-Jorca. Stampatori Gray e Bunce." 1825. 

(559) 



5 6o BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

him, "we judge too lightly of the Italians, and quote 
as axioms the absurd opinions of their insane rivals 
(accaniti rivali) the French. We conceal some things 
where silence has the appearance of malice ; we ex- 
pose others which common generosity should have 
induced us to conceal ; we are guilty of false and arbi- 
trary accusations, that do a grievous wrong to the most 
tender and most compassionate of nations ; we are 
wanting in a decent reverence for the illustrious men 
of his nation ; finally, we pry with the eyes of Argus 
into the defects of Italian literature, and with one eye 
only, and that, indeed, half shut (anche quello socchi- 
uso), into its particular merits." It is true, this sour 
rebuke is sweetened once or twice with a compliment 
to the extent of our knowledge, and a "confession 
that many of our reasonings, facts, and reflections 
merit the gratitude of his countrymen ; that our in- 
tentions were doubtless generous, praiseworthy," and 
the like ; but such vague commendations, besides that 
they are directly inconsistent with some of the impu- 
tations formerly alleged against us, are too thinly scat- 
tered over sixty pages of criticism to mitigate very 
materially the severity of the censure. The opinions 
of the author of the Osservazioni on this subject are 
undoubtedly entitled to great respect ; but it may be 
questioned whether the excitable temperament usual 
with his nation, and the local partiality which is com- 
mon to the individuals of every nation, may not have 
led him sometimes into extravagance and error. This 
seems to us to have been the case; and, as he has more 
than once intimated the extreme difficulty of forming 
a correct estimate of a foreign literature, "especially 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 561 

of the Italian," we shall rely exclusively for the sup- 
port of our opinions on the authorities of his own 
countrymen, claiming one exception only in favor of 
the industrious Ginguene, whose opinions he has him- 
self recommended to "the diligent study of all who 
would form a correct notion of Italian literature." * 

His first objection is against what he considers the 
unfair view which we exhibited of the influence of 
Italy on English letters. This influence, we had stated, 
was most perceptible under the reign of Elizabeth, but 
had gradually declined during the succeeding century, 
and, with a few exceptions, among whom we cited Mil- 
ton and Gray, could not be said to be fairly discerned 
until the commencement of the present age. Our cen- 
sor is of a different opinion. "Instead of confining 
himself'' (he designates us always by this humble pro- 
noun) "to Milton," he says, "for which exception / 
acknowledge no obligation to liim, since few there are 
who were not previously acquainted with it, I would 
have had him acknowledge that many English writers 
not only loved and admired, but studiously imitated, 
our authors, from the time of Chaucer to that of the 
great Byron ; for the clearest evidence of which it will 
suffice to read the compositions of this last poet, of 
Milton, and of Gray." He then censures us for not 
specifying the obligations which Shakspeare was under 
to the early Italian novelists for the plots of many 
of his pieces; "which silence" he deems "as little to 
be commended as would be an attempt to conceal the 

*" " Ma bisognava aver l'anima di Ginguene, conoscer la lingua e la 
letteratura Italiana come Ginguene, e amar il vero come Ginguene, 
per sentire," etc. Osservazioni, pp. 115, 116. 
Y* 



562 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



light, the most beautiful prerogative of the sun, from 
one who had never before seen it. And," he continues, 
"these facts should, for two reasons, have been espe- 
cially communicated to Americans: first, to animate 
them more and more to study the Italian tongue; and, 
secondly, in order not to imitate, by what may appear 
a malicious silence,. the example of another nation [the 
French], who, after drawing their intellectual nourish- 
ment from us, have tried every method of destroying 
the reputation of their earliest masters." — Pp. 74-79. 

We have extracted the leading ideas diffused by the 
author of the Osservazioni over half a dozen pages. 
Some of them have at least the merit of novelty. Such 
are not, however, those relating to Chaucer, whom we 
believe no one ever doubted to have found in the Tus- 
can tongue — the only one of that rude age in which 

" The pure well-head of poesie did dwell" — 

one principal source of his premature inspiration. We 
acknowledged that the same sources nourished the ge- 
nius of Queen Elizabeth's writers, among whom we 
particularly cited the names of Surrey, Sidney, and 
Spenser. And if we did not distinguish Shakspeare 
amid the circle of contemporary dramatists whom we 
confessed to have derived the designs of many of their 
most popular plays from Italian models, it was because 
we did not think the extent of his obligations, amount- 
ing to half a dozen imperfect skeletons of plots, re- 
quired any such specification ; more especially as sev- 
eral of his great minor contemporaries, as Fletcher, 
Shirley, and others, made an equally liberal use of the 
same materials. The obligations of Shakspeare, such 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 563 

as they were, are, moreover, notorious to every one. 
The author of the Osservazioni expressly disclaims any 
feelings of gratitude towards us for mentioning those 
of Milton, because they were notorious. It is really 
very hard to please him. The literary enterprise which 
had been awakened under the reign of Elizabeth was 
in no degree diminished under her successor; but the 
intercourse with Italy, so favorable to it at an earlier 
period, was, for obvious reasons, at an end. A Prot- 
estant people, but lately separated from the Church of 
Rome, would not deign to resort to what they believed 
her corrupt fountains for the sources of instruction. 
The austerity of the Puritan was yet more scandalized 
by the voluptuous beauties of her lighter compositions, 
and Milton, whose name we cited in our article, seems 
to have been a solitary exception on the records of that 
day, of an eminent English scholar thoroughly imbued 
with a relish for Italian letters. 

After the days of civil and religious faction had gone 
by, a new aspect was given to things under the brilliant 
auspices of the Restoration. The French language was 
at that time in the meridian of its glory. Boileau, with 
an acute but pedantic taste, had draughted his critical 
ordinances from the most perfect models of classical 
antiquity. Racine, working on these principles, may 
be said to have put into action the poetic conceptions 
of his friend Boileau ; and, with such a model to illus- 
trate the excellence of his theory, it is not wonderful 
that the code of the French legislator, recommended 
as it was, too, by the patronage of the most imposing 
court in Europe, should have found its way into the 
rival kingdom and have superseded there every other 



5 6 4 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



foreign influence.* It did so. "French criticism," 
says Bishop Hurd, speaking of this period, "has car- 
ried it before the Italian with the rest of Europe. This 
dexterous people have found means to lead the taste, as 
well as set the fashions, of their neighbors." Again: 
"The exact but cold Boileau happened to say some- 
thing of the clinquant of Tasso, and the magic of this 
word, like the report of Astolfo's horn in Ariosto, 
overturned at once the solid and well-built foundation 
of Italian poetry : it became a sort of watch-word 
among the critics." Mr. Gifford, whose acquaintance 
with the ancient literature of his nation entitles him 
to perfect confidence on this subject, whatever we may 
be disposed to concede to him on some others, in his 
introduction to Massinger remarks, in relation to this 
period, that "criticism, which in a former reign had 
been making no inconsiderable progress under the 
great masters of Italy, was now diverted into a new 
channel, and only studied under the puny and jejune 
canons of their degenerate followers, the French-' 
Pope and Addison, the legislators of their own and a 
future age, cannot be exempted from this reproach. 
The latter conceived and published the most con- 
temptuous opinion of the Italians. In a very earJy 
paper of the Spectator bearing his own signature (No. 
6), he observes, "The finest writers among the modern 

* Boileau's sagacity in fully appreciating the merits of Phedre and 
of Athalie, and his independence in supporting them against the 
fashionable factions of the day, are well known. But he conferred a 
still greater obligation on his friend. Racine the younger tells us that 
"his father, in his youth, was given to a vicious taste {concetti), and 
that Boileau led him back to nature, and taught him to rhyme with 
labor {rimer difficilement)." 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 565 

Italians [in contradistinction to the ancient Romans] 
express themselves in such a florid form of words, and 
such tedious circumlocutions, as are used by none but 
pedants in our own country, and at the same time fill 
their writings with such poor imaginations and con- 
ceits as our youths are ashamed of before they have 
been two years at the university." In the same paper 
he adds, "I entirely agree with Monsieur Boileau, that 
one verse of Virgil is worth all the tinsel of Tasso." 
This is very unequivocal language, and our censor will 
do us the justice to believe that we do not quote it 
from any "malicious intention," but simply to show 
what must have been the popular taste, when senti- 
ments like these were promulgated by a leading critic 
of the day, in the most important and widely-circu- 
lated journal in the kingdom.* 

In conformity with this anti-Italian spirit, we find 
that no translation of Ariosto was attempted subse- 
quent to the very imperfect one by Harrington in 
Elizabeth's time. In the reign of George the Second 
a new version was published by one Huggins. In his 
preface he observes, "After this work was pretty far 
advanced, I was informed there had been a transla- 
tion published in the reign of Elizabeth, and dedicated 
to that queen ; whereupon I requested a friend to ob- 
tain a sight of that book ; for it is, it seems, very 
scarce, and the glorious original much more so, in this 

* Addison tells us, in an early number of the Spectator, that three 
thousand copies were daily distributed ; and Chalmers somewhere 
remarks that this circulation was afterwards increased to fourteen 
thousand ; an amount, in proportion to the numerical population and 
intellectual culture of that day, very far superior to that of the most 
popular journals at the present time. 

48 



5 66 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

country." Huggins was a learned scholar, although he 
made a bad translation. Yet it seems he had never 
met with, or even heard of, the version of his prede- 
cessor Harrington. But, without encumbering our- 
selves with authorities, a glance at the compositions 
of the period in question would show how feeble are 
the pretensions of an Italian influence, and we are 
curious to know what important names, or produc- 
tions, or characteristics can be cited by the author of 
the Osservazioni in support of it. Dryden, whom he 
has objected to us, versified, it is true, three of his 
Fables from Boccaccio ; but this brief effort is the 
only evidence we can recall, in the multitude of his 
miscellaneous writings, of a respect for Italian letters, 
and he is well known to have powerfully contributed 
to the introduction of a French taste in the drama. 
The only exception which occurs to our general re- 
mark is that afforded by the Metaphysical School of 
Poets, whose vicious propensities have been referred 
by Dr. Johnson to Marini and his followers. But as 
an ancient English model for this affectation may be 
found in Donne, and as the doctor was not prodigal 
of golden opinions towards Italy, we will not urge 
upon our opponent what may be deemed an ungener- 
ous, perhaps an unjust, imputation. The same indiffer- 
ence appears to have lasted the greater portion of the 
eighteenth century, and with few exceptions, enumer- 
ated in our former article, the Tuscan spring seems to 
have been almost hermetically sealed against the Eng- 
lish scholar. The increasing thirst for every variety 
of intellectual nourishment in our age has again in- 
vited to these early sources, and, while every modern 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 567 

tongue has been anxiously explored by the diligence 
of critics, the Italian has had the good fortune to be 
more widely and more successfully cultivated than at 
any former period. 

We should apologize to our readers for afflicting 
them with so much commonplace detail, but we know 
no other way of rebutting the charge, which, accord- 
ing to the author of the Osservazioni, might be im- 
puted to us, of a "malicious silence" in our account 
of the influence of Italian letters in England. 

But if we have offended by saying too little on the 
preceding head, we have given equal offence on an- 
other occasion by saying too much. Our antagonist 
attacks us from such opposite quarters that we hardly 
know where to expect him. We had spoken, and in 
terms of censure, of Boileau's celebrated sarcasm upon 
Tasso ; and we had added that, notwithstanding an 
affected change of opinion, "he adhered until the 
time of his death to his original heresy." "As 
much," says our censor, "as it would have been de- 
sirable in him [the reviewer] to have spoken on these 
other matters, so it would have been equally proper to 
have suppressed all that Boileau wrote upon Tasso, to- 
gether with the remarks made by him in the latter part 
of his life, as having a tendency to prejudice unfavor- 
ably the minds of such as had not before heard them. 
Nor should he have coldly styled it his 'original her- 
esy;' but he should have said that, in spite of all the 
heresies of Boileau and all the blunders of Voltaire, 
the Jerusalem has been regarded for more than two 
centuries and a half, and will be regarded, as long as 
the earth has motion, by all the nations of the civilized 



5 68 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

world, as the most noble, most magnificent, most sub- 
lime epic produced for more than eighteen centuries ; 
that this consent and this duration of its splendor are 
the strongest and most authentic seal of its incontro- 
vertible merit ; that this unlucky clinquant, that de- 
faces at most a hundred verses of this poem, and 
which, in fact, is nothing but an excess of over- 
wrought beauty, is but the merest flaw in a mountain 
of diamonds ; that these hundred verses are compen- 
sated by more than three thousand in which are dis- 
played all the perfection, grace, learning, eloquence, 
and coloring of the loftiest poetry." In the same 
swell of commendation the author proceeds for half a 
page farther. We know not what inadvertence on our 
part can have made it necessary, by way of reproof to 
us, to pour upon Tasso's head such a pelting of pitiless 
panegyric. Among all the Italian poets there is no 
one for whom we have ever felt so sincere a venera- 
tion, after 

•' quel signor dell' altissimo canto 
Che sovra gli altri, com' aquila vola," 

as for Tasso. In some respects he is even superior to 
Dante. His writings are illustrated by a purer mo- 
rality, as his heart was penetrated with a more genuine 
spirit of Christianity. Oppression, under which they 
both suffered the greater part of their lives, wrought a 
very different effect upon the gentle character of Tasso 
and the vindictive passions of the Ghibelline. The 
religious wars of Jerusalem, exhibiting the triumphs 
of the Christian chivalry, were a subject peculiarly 
adapted to the character of the poet, who united the 
qualities of an accomplished knight with the most un- 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 569 

affected piety. The vulgar distich, popular in his day 
with the common people of Ferrara, is a homely but 
unsuspicious testimony to his opposite virtues.* His 
greatest fault was an ill-regulated sensibility, and his 
greatest misfortune was to have been thrown among 
people who knew not how to compassionate the in- 
firmities of genius. In contemplating such a charac- 
ter, one may without affectation feel a disposition to 
draw a veil over the few imperfections that tarnished 
it, and in our notice of it, expanded into a dozen 
pages, there are certainly not the same number of 
lines devoted to his defects, and those exclusively of a 
literary nature. This is but a moderate allowance for 
the transgressions of any man \ yet, according to Mr. 
Da Ponte, "we close our eyes against the merits of 
his countrymen, and pry with those of Argus into their 
defects. ' ' 

But why are we to be debarred the freedom of criti- 
cism enjoyed even by the Italians themselves? To 
read the Osservazioni, one would conclude that Tasso, 

* " Colla penna e colla spada, 

Nessun val quanto Torquato." 

This elegant couplet was made in consequence of a victory ob- 
tained by Tasso over three cavaliers who treacherously attacked him 
in one of the public squares of Ferrara. His skill in fencing is noto- 
rious, and his passion for it is also betrayed by the frequent, circum- 
stantial, and masterly pictures of it in his "Jerusalem." See, in par- 
ticular, the mortal combat between Tancred and Argante, canto xix., 
where all the evolutions of the art are depicted with the accuracy of 
a professed sword-player. In the same manner, the numerous and 
animated allusions to field-sports betray the favorite pastime of the 
author of Waverley; and the falcon, the perpetual subject of illustra- 
tion and simile in the " Divina Commedia," might lead us to suspect 
a similar predilection in Dante. 

48* 



57° 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



from his first appearance, had united all suffrages in 
his favor; that, by unanimous acclamation, his poem 
had been placed at the head of all the epics of the 
last eighteen centuries, and that the only voice raised 
against him had sprung from the petty rivalries of 
French criticism, from which source we are more than 
once complimented with having recruited our own 
forces. Does our author reckon for nothing the recep- 
tion with which the first academy in Italy greeted the 
Jerusalem on its introduction into the world, when 
they would have smothered it with the kindness of 
their criticism ? Or the volumes of caustic commen- 
tary by the celebrated Galileo, almost every line of 
which is a satire ? Or, to descend to a later period, 
when the lapse of more than a century may be sup- 
posed to have rectified the caprice of contemporary 
judgments, may we not shelter ourselves under the au- 
thorities of Andres,* whose favorable notice of Italian 
letters our author cites with deference ; of Metastasio, 
the avowed admirer and eulogist of Tasso ; f of Gra- 
vina, whose philosophical treatise on the principles of 
poetry, a work of great authority in his own country, 
exhibits the most ungrateful irony on the literary pre- 
tensions of Tasso, almost refusing to him the title of a 
poet ? \ 

But, to proceed no farther, we may abide by the 
solid judgment of Ginguene, that second Daniel, whose 
opinions we are advised so strenuously "to study and 
to meditate." "As to florid images, frivolous thoughts, 

* Dell' Origine, etc., d'ogni Letteratura, torn. iv. p. 250. 
f Opere postume di Metastasio, torn. iii. p. 30. 
\ Ragion poetica, pp. 161, 162. 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



571 



affected turns, conceits, and jeux de mots, they are to 
be found in greater abundance in Tasso's poem than is 
commonly imagined. The enumeration of them would 
be long, if one should run over the Jerusalem and cite 
all that could be classed under one or other of these 
heads, etc. Let us content ourselves with a few ex- 
amples." He then devotes ten pages to these few 
examples (our author is indignant that we should 
have bestowed as many lines), and closes with this 
sensible reflection: "I have not promised a blind faith 
in the writers I admire the most ; I have not promised 
it to Boileau, I have not promised it to Tasso ; and in 
literature we all owe our faith and homage to the eter- 
nal laws of truth, of nature, and of taste."* 

But, in order to relieve Tasso from an undue respon- 
sibility, we had stated in our controverted article that 
" the affectations imputed to him were to be traced to 
a much more remote origin;" that "Petrarch's best 
productions were stained with them, as were those of 
preceding poets, and that they seemed to have flowed 
directly from the Provencal, the fountain of Italian 
lyric poetry." This transfer of the sins of one poet 
to the door of another is not a whit more to the ap- 
probation of our censor, and he not only flatly denies 
the truth of our remark, as applied to "Petrarch's best 
productions," but gravely pronounces it "one of the 
most solemn, the most horrible literary blasphemies 
that ever proceeded from the tongue or pen of mor- 
tal !" f "I maintain," says he, "that not one of those 

* Histoire litteraire, torn. v. pp. 368, 378. 

f " Dird essere questa una delle phi solenni, delle piu orribili lette- 
rarie bestemmie, che sia stata mai pronunziata o scritta da lingua o 
penna mortale." — P. 94. 



572 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

that are truly Petrarch's best productions, and there are 
very many, can be accused of such a defect ; let but the 
critic point me out a single affected or vicious expres- 
sion in the three patriotic Canzoni, or in the Chiare 
fresche e dolci acque, or in the Tre Sorelle" etc. (he 
names several others), "or, in truth, in any of the 
rest, excepting one or two only." He then recom- 
mends to us that, "instead of hunting out the errors 
and blemishes of these masters of our intellects, and 
occupying ourselves with unjust and unprofitable criti- 
cism, we should throw over them the mantle of grati- 
tude, and recompense them with our eulogiums and 
applause." In conformity with which, the author pro- 
ceeds to pour out his grateful tribute on the head of 
the ancient laureate for two pages farther, but which, 
as not material to the argument, we must omit. 

We know no better way of answering all this than 
by taking up the gauntlet thrown down to us, and we 
are obliged to him for giving us the means of bring- 
ing the matter to so speedy an issue. We will take 
one of the first Canzoni, of which he has challenged 
our scrutiny. It is in Petrarch's best manner, and 
forms the first of a series which has received, xar l~oyjp, 
the title of the Three Sisters {Tre Sore lie). It is in- 
dited to his mistress's eyes, and the first stanza con- 
tains a beautiful invocation to these sources of a lover's 
inspiration ; but in the second we find him relapsing 
into the genuine Provencal heresy: 

" When I become snow before their burning rays, 
Your noble pride 

Is perhaps offended with my unworthiness. 
Oh, if this my apprehension 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 573 

Should not temper the flame that consumes me, 

Happy should I be to dissolve ; since in their presence 

It is dearer to me to die than to live without them. 

Then, that I do not melt, 

Being so frail an object, before so potent afire, 

It is not my own strength which saves me from it, 

But principally fear, 

Which congeals the blood wandering through my veins, 

And mends the heart that it may btim a long time."* 

This melancholy parade of cold conceits, of fire and 
snow, thawing and freezing, is extracted, be it ob- 
served, from one of those choice productions which is 
recommended as without a blemish ; indeed, not only 
is it one of the best, but it was esteemed by Petrarch 
himself, together with its two sister odes, the very best 
of his lyrical pieces, and the decision of the poet has 
been ratified by posterity. Let it not be objected that 
the spirit of an ode must necessarily evaporate in a 
prose translation. The ideas may be faithfully tran- 
scribed, and we would submit it to the most ordinary 
taste whether ideas like those above quoted can ever 
be ennobled by any artifice of expression. 

We think the preceding extract from one of the 

* " Quando agli ardenti rai neve divegno, 
Vostro gentile sdegno 
Forse ch' allor mia indegnitate ofifende. 
O, se questa temenza 
Non temprasse 1' arsura che m' incende, 
Beato venir men ! che n' lor presenza 
M' e piu caro il morir, che 1' viver senza. 
Dunque ch' i' non mi sfaccia, 
Si frale oggetto a si possente foco, 
Non e proprio valor, che me ne scampi ; 
Ma la paura un poco, 

Che '1 sangue vago per le vene agghiaccia, 
Risalda '1 cor, perche piu tempo avvampi." 

Canzone vii., nell' Edizione di Muratori. 



574 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

"best of Petrarch's compositions" may sufficiently 
vindicate us from the imputation of unprecedented 
"blasphemy" on his poetical character; but, lest an 
appeal be again made, on the ground of a diversity in 
national taste, we will endeavor to fortify our feeble 
judgment with one or two authorities among his own 
countrymen, whom Mr. Da Ponte may be more inclined 
to admit. 

The Italians have exceeded every other people in 
the grateful tribute of commentaries which they have 
paid to the writings of their eminent men : some of 
these are of extraordinary value, especially in verbal 
criticism, while many more, by the contrary lights 
which they shed over the path of the scholar, serve 
rather to perplex than to enlighten it.* Tassoni and 
Muratori are accounted among the best of Petrarch's 
numerous commentators, and the latter, in particular, 
has discriminated his poetical character with as much 
independence as feeling. We cannot refrain from 
quoting a few lines from Muratori's preface, as ex- 
ceedingly pertinent to our present purpose : "Who, I 
beg to ask, is so pedantic, so blind an admirer of Pe- 

* A single ode has furnished a repast for a volume. The number 
of Petrarch's commentators is incredible : no less than a dozen of the 
most eminent Italian scholars have been occupied with annotations 
upon him at the same time. Dante has been equally fortunate. A 
noble Florentine projected an edition of a hundred volumes for the 
hundred cantos of the " Commedia," which should embrace the dif- 
ferent illustrations. One of the latest of the fraternity, Biagioli, in an 
edition of Dante, published at Paris, 1818, not only claims for his 
master a foreknowledge of the existence of America, but of the cele- 
brated Harveian discovery of the circulation of the blood! (Tom. 
i. p. 18, note.) After this, one may feel less surprise at the bulk of 
these commentaries. 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



575 



trarch, that he will pretend that no defects are to be 
found in his verses, or, being found, will desire they 
should be respected with a religious silence ? Whatever 
may be our rule in regard to moral defects, there can 
be no doubt that in those of art and science the public 
interest requires that truth should be openly unveiled, 
since it is important that all should distinguish the 
beautiful from the bad, in order to imitate the one and 
to avoid the other."* In the same tone speaks Tira- 
boschi (torn. v. p. 474). Yet more to the purpose is 
an observation of the Abbe Denina upon Petrarch, 
"who," says he, " not only in his more ordinary sonnets 
affords obvious examples of affectation and coldness, 
but in his most tender and jnost beautiful compositions 
approaches the conceited and inflated style of which I 
am now speaking." f And the "impartial Ginguene," 
a name we love to quote, confesses that "Petrarch 
could not deny himself those puerile antitheses of cold 
and heat, of ice and flames, which occasionally disfigure 
his most interesting and most agreeable pieces." 1 ' } \ It 
would be easy to marshal many other authorities of 
equal weight in our defence, but obviously superfluous, 
since those we have adduced are quite competent to 
our vindication from the reproach, somewhat severe, 
of having uttered "the most horrible blasphemy which 
ever proceeded from the pen of mortal." 

The age of Petrarch, like that of Shakspeare, must 
be accountable for his defects, and in this manner we 

* Le Rime di F. Petrarca ; con le Osservazioni di Tassoni, Muzio, 
e Muratori. Pref., p. 9. 

f Vicende della Letteratura, torn. ii. p. 55. 
\ Histoire litteraire, torn. ii. p. 566. 



576 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

may justify the character of the poet where we cannot 
that of his compositions. The Provencal, the most 
polished European dialect of the Middle Ages, had 
reached its last perfection before the fourteenth cen- 
tury. Its poetry, chiefly amatory and lyrical, may be 
considered as the homage offered by the high-bred 
cavaliers of that day at the shrine of beauty, and, of 
whatever value for its literary execution, is interesting 
for the beautiful grace it diffuses over the iron age of 
chivalry. It was, as we have said, principally devoted 
to love ; those who did not feel could at least affect 
the tender passion ; and hence the influx of subtle 
metaphors and frigid conceits that give a meretricious 
brilliancy to most of the Provencal poetry. The 
fathers of Italian verse, Guido, Cino, etc., seduced 
by the fashion of the period, clothed their own more 
natural sentiments in the same vicious forms of expres- 
sion ; even Dante, in his admiration, often avowed, 
for the Troubadours, could not be wholly insensible 
to their influence ; but the less austere Petrarch, both 
from constitutional temperament and the accidental 
circumstances of his situation, was more deeply affected 
by them. In the first place, a pertinacious attachment 
to a mistress whose heart was never warmed, although 
her vanity may have been gratified by the adulation of 
the finest poet of the age, seems to have maintained 
an inexplicable control over his affections, or his 
fancy, during the greater portion of his life. In the 
amatory poetry of the ancients, polluted with coarse 
and licentious images, he could find no model for the 
expression of this sublimated passion. But the Pla- 
tonic theory of love had been imported into Italy 



CRITIC A L M ISC EL LA NIES. 



577 



by the fathers of the Church, and Petrarch, better 
schooled in ancient learning than any of his contem- 
poraries, became early enamored of the speculative 
doctrines of the Greek philosophy. To this source 
he was indebted for those abstractions and visionary 
ecstasies which sometimes give a generous elevation, 
but very often throw a cloud over his conceptions. 
And, again, an intimate familiarity with the Provencal 
poetry was the natural consequence of his residence in 
the south of France. There, too, he must often have 
been a spectator at those metaphysical disputations in 
the courts of love, which exhibited the same ambition 
of metaphor, studied antithesis, and hyperbole, as the 
written compositions of Provence. To all these causes 
may be referred those defects which, under favor be it 
spoken, occasionally offend us, even "in his most per- 
fect compositions." The rich finish which Petrarch 
gave to the Tuscan idiom has perpetuated these defects 
in the poetry of his country. Decipit exemplar vitiis 
imitabile. His beauties were inimitable, but to copy 
his errors was in some measure to tread in his foot- 
steps, and a servile race of followers sprang up in Italy, 
who, under the emphatic name of Petrarchists, have 
been the object of derision or applause, as a good or 
a bad taste predominated in their country. Warton, 
with apparent justice, refers to the same source some 
of the early corruptions in English poetry; and Pe- 
trarch — we hope it is not "blasphemy" to say it — 
becomes, by the very predominance of his genius, 
eminently responsible for the impurities of diction 
which disfigure some of the best productions both in 
English literature and his own. 
z 49 



578 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

We trust that the free manner in which we have 
spoken will not be set down by the author of the Osscr- 
vazioni to a malicious desire of "calumniating" the 
literature of his country. We have been necessarily led 
to it in vindication of our former assertions. After an 
interval of nearly five centuries, the dispassionate voice 
of posterity has awarded to Petrarch the exact measure 
of censure and applause. We have but repeated their 
judgment. No one of the illustrious triumvirate of 
the fourteenth century can pretend to have possessed so 
great an influence over his own age and over posterity. 
Dante, sacrificed by a faction, was, as he pathetically 
complains, a wandering mendicant in a land of stran- 
gers; Boccaccio, with the interval of a few years in the 
meridian of his life, passed from the gayety of a court 
to the seclusion of a cloister ; but Petrarch, the friend, 
the minister of princes, devoted, during the whole of 
his long career, his wealth, his wide authority, and his 
talents to the generous cause of philosophy and letters. 
He was unwearied in his researches after ancient manu- 
scripts, and from the most remote corners of Italy, from 
the obscure recesses of churches and monasteries, he 
painfully collected the mouldering treasures of an- 
tiquity. Many of them he copied with his own hand, 
— among the rest, all the works of Cicero; and his 
beautiful transcript of the epistles of the Roman orator 
is still preserved in the Laurentian Library at Florence. 
In his numerous Latin compositions he aspired to re- 
vive the purity and elegance of the Augustan age ; and, 
if he did not altogether succeed in the attempt, he may 
claim the merit of having opened the soil for the more 
successful cultivation of later Italian scholars. 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



579 



His own efforts, and the generous impulse which his 
example communicated to his age, have justly entitled 
him to be considered the restorer of classical learning. 
His greatest glory, however, is derived from the spirit 
of life which he breathed into modern letters. Dante 
had fortified the Tuscan idiom with the vigor and se- 
vere simplicity of an ancient language, but the grace- 
ful genius of Petrarch was wanting to ripen it into that 
harmony of numbers which has made it the most mu- 
sical of modern dialects. His knowledge of the Pro- 
vencal enabled him to enrich his native tongue with 
many foreign beauties ; his exquisite ear disposed him 
to refuse all but the most melodious combinations; 
and, at the distance of five hundred years, not a word 
in him has become obsolete, not a phrase too quaint to 
be used. Voltaire has passed the same high eulogium 
upon Pascal ; but Pascal lived three centuries later than 
Petrarch. It would be difficult to point out the writer 
who so far fixed the iitea Tzrepoevra-, we certainly could 
not assign an earlier period than the commencement 
of the last century. Petrarch's brilliant success in the 
Italian led to most important consequences all over 
Europe by the evidence which it afforded of the ca- 
pacities of a modern tongue. He relied, however, for 
his future fame on his elaborate Latin compositions, 
and, while he dedicated these to men of the highest 
rank, he gave away his Italian lyrics to ballad-mongers, 
to be chanted about the streets for their own profit. 
His contemporaries authorized this judgment, and it 
was for his Latin eclogues, and his epic on Scipio 
Africanus, that he received the laurel wreath of poetry 
in the Capitol. But nature must eventually prevail 



5 So BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

over the decisions of pedantry or fashion. By one of 
those fluctuations not very uncommon in the history 
of letters, the author of the Latin "Africa" is now 
known only as the lover of Laura and the father of 
Italian song. 

We have been led into this long, we fear tedious, 
exposition of the character of Petrarch, partly from the 
desire of defending the justice of our former criticism 
against the heavy imputations of the author of the 
Osservazioni, and partly from reluctance to dwell only 
on the dark side of a picture so brilliant as that of the 
laureate, who, in a barbarous age, with 

" his rhetorike so swete 
Enluminid all Itaile of poetrie." 

Our limits will compel us to pass lightly over some 
less important strictures of our author. 

About the middle of the last century a bitter con- 
troversy arose between Tiraboschi and Lampillas, a 
learned but intemperate Spaniard, respecting which of 
their two nations had the best claim to the reproach 
of having corrupted the other's literature in the six- 
teenth century. In alluding to it, we had remarked 
that "the Italian had the better of his adversary in 
temper, if not in argument." The author of the 
Osservazioni styles this "a dry and dogmatic decision, 
which so much displeased a certain Italian letterato 
that he had promised him a confutation of it." We 
know not who the indignant letterato may be whose 
thunder has been so long hanging over us, but we must 
say that, so far from a "dogmatic decision," if ever 
we made a circumspect remark in our lives, this was 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 581 

one. As far as it went, it was complimentary to the 
Italians ; for the rest, we waived all discussion of the 
merits of the controversy, both because it was imper- 
tinent to our subject, and because we were not suffi- 
ciently instructed in the details to go into it. One or 
two reflections, however, we may now add. The rela- 
tive position of Italy and Spain, political and literary, 
makes it highly probable that the predominant influ- 
ence, of whatever kind it may have been, proceeded 
from Italy. 1. She had matured her literature to a 
high perfection while that of every other nation was 
in its infancy, and she was, of course, much more 
likely to communicate than to receive impressions. 
2. Her political relations with Spain were such as par- 
ticularly to increase this probability in reference to 
her. The occupation of an insignificant corner of 
her own territory (for Naples was very insignificant in 
every literary aspect) by the house of Aragon opened 
an obvious channel for the transmission of her opinions 
into the sister kingdom. 3. Any one, even an Italian, 
at all instructed in the Spanish literature, will admit 
that this actually did happen in the reign of Charles 
the Fifth, the golden age of Italy; that not only, in- 
deed, the latter country influenced but changed the 
whole complexion of Spanish letters, establishing, 
through the intervention of her high-priests, Boscan 
and Garcilaso, what is universally recognized under 
the name of an Italian school. This was an era of 
good taste; but when, only fifty years later, both lan- 
guages were overrun with those deplorable affectations 
which, in Italy particularly, have made the very name 
of the century (seicento) a term of reproach, it would 

49* 



582 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

seem probable that the same country which but so 
short a time before had possessed so direct an influ- 
ence over the other should through the same channels 
have diffused the poison with which its own literature 
was infected. As Marini and Gongora, however, the 
reputed founders of the school, were contemporaries, 
it is extremely difficult to adjust the precise claims of 
either to the melancholy credit of originality ; and, 
after all, the question to foreigners can be one of little 
interest or importance. 

Much curiosity has existed respecting the source of 
those affectations which, at different periods, have 
tainted the modern languages of Europe. Each na- 
tion is ambitious of tracing them to a foreign origin, 
and all have at some period or other agreed to find 
this in Italy. From this quarter the French critics 
derive their style precieux, which disappeared before 
the satire of Moliere and Boileau ; from this the Eng- 
lish derive their metaphysical school of Cowley; and 
the cultismo, of which we have been speaking, which 
Lope and Quevedo condemned by precept but author- 
ized by example, is referred by the Spaniards to the 
same source. The early celebrity of Petrarch and his 
vicious imitators may afford a specious justification of 
all this ; but a generous criticism may perhaps be ex- 
cused in referring them to a more ancient origin. The 
Provencal for three centuries was the most popular 
and, as we have before said, the most polished dialect 
in Europe. The language of the people all along the 
fertile coasts of the Mediterranean, it was also the lan- 
guage of poetry in most of the polite courts of Europe, 
— in those of Toulouse, Provence, Sicily, and of sev- 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. ^ 

eral in Italy; it reached its highest perfection under 
the Spanish nobles of Aragon ; it passed into England 
in the twelfth century with the dowry of Eleanor of 
Guienne and Poictou; even kings did not disdain to 
cultivate it, and the lion-hearted Richard, if report be 
true, could embellish the rude virtues of chivalry with 
the milder glories of a Troubadour.* When this pre- 
cocious dialect had become extinct, its influence still 
remained. The early Italian poets gave a sort of clas- 
sical sanction to its defects; but, while their genius 
may thus with justice be accused of scattering the 
seeds of corruption, the soil must be confessed to have 
been universally prepared for their reception at a more 
remote period. 

Thus the metaphysical conceits of Cowley's school, 
which Dr. Johnson has referred to Marini, may be 
traced through the poetry of Donne, of Shakspeare 
and his contemporaries, of Surrey, Wyatt, and Chau- 
cer, up to the fugitive pieces of the thirteenth and 
fourteenth centuries, which have been redeemed from 
oblivion by the diligence of the antiquarian. In the 
same manner, the religious and amatory poetry of 
Spain at the close of the thirteenth century, as exhib- 

* Every one is acquainted with Sismondi's elegant treatise on the 
Provencal poetry. It cannot, however, now be relied on as of the 
highest authority. The subject has been much more fully explored, 
since the publication of his work, by Monsieur Raynouard, Secretary 
of the French Aademy. His Poesies des Troubadours has now 
reached the sixth volume ; and W. A. Schlegel, in a treatise of little 
bulk but great learning, entitled Observations sur la Langue et la 
Litterature Provencale, has pronounced it, by the facts it has brought 
to light, to have given the coup de grace to the theory of Father 
Andres, whom Sismondi has chiefly followed. 



584 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

ited in their Cancio?ieros, displays the same subtleties 
and barbaric taste for ornament, from which few of- 
her writers, even in the riper season of her literature, 
have been wholly uncontaminated. Perhaps the per- 
versities of Voiture and of Scudery may find as re- 
mote a genealogy in France. The corruptions of the 
Pleiades may afford one link in the chain, and any 
one who has leisure might verify our suggestions. Al- 
most every modern literature seems to have contained 
in its earliest germs an active principle of corruption. 
The perpetual lapses into barbarism have at times 
triumphed over all efforts of sober criticism; and the 
perversion of intellect for the greater part of a century 
may furnish to the scholar an ample field for humili-: 
ating reflection. How many fine geniuses in the con- 
demned age of the seicentisti, wandering after the false 
lights of Marini and his school, substituted cold con- 
ceits for wit, puns for thoughts, and wire-drawn meta- 
phors for simplicity and nature ! How many, with 
Cowley, exhausted a genuine wit in hunting out re- 
mote analogies and barren combinations, or, with 
Lope, and even Calderon, devoted pages to curious 
distortions of rhyme, to echoes or acrostics, in scenes 
which invited all the eloquence of poetry ! Prostitu- 
tions of genius like these not merely dwarf the human 
mind, but carry it back centuries to the scholastic 
subtleties, the alliterations, anagrams, and thousand 
puerile devices of the Middle Ages. 

But we have already rambled too far from the author 
of the Osservazioni. Our next rock of offence is a 
certain inconsiderate astonishment which we expressed 
at the patience of his countrymen under the infliction 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 585 

of epics of thirty and forty cantos in length ; and he 
reminds us of our corresponding taste, equally unac- 
countable, for novels and romances spun out into an 
interminable length, like those, for example, by the 
author of Waverley [p. 82 to 85]. A liberal criti- 
cism, we are aware, will be diffident of censuring the 
discrepancies of national tastes. Where the value of 
the thought is equal, the luxury of polished verse and 
poetic imagery may yield a great superiority to poetry 
over prose, particularly with a people so sensible to 
melody and of so vivacious a fancy as the Italians ; 
but, then, to accomplish all this requires a higher de- 
gree of skill in the artist, and mediocrity in poetry is 
intolerable. 

" Mediocribus esse poetis 
Non homines, non Di," etc. 

Horace's maxim is not the less true for being some- 
what stale. D'Alembert has uttered a sweeping denun- 
ciation against all long works in verse, as impossible 
to be read through without experiencing ennui ; from 
which he does not except even the masterpieces of 
antiquity.* What would he have said to a second-rate 
Italian epic, wiredrawn into thirty or forty cantos, of 
the incredibilia of chivalry ! 

The English novel, if tolerably well executed, may 
convey some solid instruction in its details of life, of 
human character, and of passion ; but the tales of 
chivalry — the overcharged pictures of an imaginary 
state of society, of "Gorgons, hydras, and chimeras 
dire" — can be regarded only as an intellectual relaxa- 
tion. In a less polished dialect, and in a simpler age, 

* CEuvres philosophiques, etc., torn. iv. p. 152. 
z* 



586 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

they beguiled the tedious evenings of our unlettered 
Norman ancestors, and as late as Elizabeth's day they 
incurred their parting malediction from the worthy 
Ascham, as "stuff for wise men to laugh at, whose 
whole pleasure standeth in open manslaughter and 
bold bawdry." The remarks in our article, of course, 
had no reference to the chef-d" ceuvres of their romantic 
muse, many of which we had been diligently com- 
mending. It is the prerogative of genius, we all know, 
to consecrate whatever it touches. 

Some other of our general remarks seem to have 
been barbed arrows to the patriot breast of the author 
of the Osservazioni. Such are our reflections " on the 
want of a moral or philosophical aim in the ornamental 
writings of the Italians;" on "love, as suggesting the 
constant theme and impulse to their poets;" on the 
evil tendency of their language, in seducing their 
writers into "an overweening attention to sound." 
There are few general reflections which have the good 
fortune not to require many, and sometimes very im- 
portant, exceptions. The physiognomy of a nation, 
whether moral or intellectual, must be made up of 
those features which arrest the eye most frequently 
and forcibly on a wide survey of them ; yet how many 
individual portraits, after all, may refuse to correspond 
with the prevailing one ! The Boeotians were dull to a 
proverb;* yet the most inspired, in the most inspired 
region of Greek poetry, was a Boeotian. The most 
amusing of Greek prose writers was a Boeotian. Or, 
to take recent examples, when we find the "accurate 
Ginguene" speaking of "the universal corruption of 

* " Sus Boeotica, auris Boeotica, Boeoticum ingenium." 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 587 

taste in Italy during the seventeenth century," or Sis- 
mondi telling us that " the abuse of wit extinguished 
there, during that age, every other species of talent " we 
are obviously not to nail them down to a pedantic pre- 
cision of language, or how are we to dispose of some of 
the finest poets and scholars Italy has ever produced, 
— of Chiabrera, Filicaja, Galileo, and other names 
sufficiently numerous to swell into a bulky quarto of 
Tiraboschi ? The same pruning principle applied to 
writers who, like Montesquieu, Madame de Stael, and 
Schlegel, deal in general views, would go near to strip 
them of all respect or credibility. 

But it is frivolous to multiply examples. Dante, 
Tasso, Alemanni, Guidi, Petrarch often, the generous 
Filicaja always, with, doubtless, very many others, 
afford an honorable exception to our remark on the 
want of a moral aim in the lighter walks of Italian 
letters, and to many of these, by indirect criticism, we 
accorded it in our article. But let any scholar cast 
his eye over the prolific productions of their romantic 
muse, which even Tiraboschi censures as " crude and 
insipid," * and Gravina deplores as having "excluded 
the light of truth" from his countrymen ; f or on their 
thousand tales of pleasantry and love, which, since 
Boccaccio's example, have agreeably perpetuated the 
ingenious inventions of a barbarous age;! or roun d 

* Letteratura Italiana, torn. vii. part. iii. s. 42. 

■J" Ragion poetica, p. 14. 

\ The Italian Novelle, it is well known, were originally suggested 
by the French fabliaux of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. It 
may be worthy of remark that, while in Italy these amusing fictions 
have been diligently propagated from Boccaccio to the present day, 
in England, although recommended by a genius like Chaucer, they 



588 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

"the circle of frivolous extravagances," as Salfi* char- 
acterizes the burlesque novelties with which the Italian 
wits have regaled the laughter-loving appetite of their 
nation ; or on their hecatombs of amorous lyrics alone ; 
and he may accept, in these saturated varieties of the 
national literature, a decent apology, if not an ample 
justification, for our assertion. 

But are we not to speak of "love as furnishing the 
great impulse to the Italian poet," and "as prevailing 
in his bosom far over every other affection or relation 
in life" ? Have not their most illustrious writers, 
Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Sannazarius, Tasso, nay, 
philosophic prelates like Bembo, politic statesmen like 
Lorenzo, embalmed the names of their mistresses in 
verse, until they have made them familiar in every 
corner of Italy as their own ? Is not nearly half of 
the miscellaneous selection of lyrics, in the vulgar 
edition of "Italian classics," exclusively amatory? 
Had Milton, Dryden, Pope, or, still more, such solid 
personages as Bishop Warburton or Dr. Johnson (whose 
"Tetty," we suspect, never stirred the doctor's poetic 
feeling), dedicated, not a passing sonnet, but whole 
volumes to their Beatrices, Lauras, and Leonoras, we 

have scarcely been adopted by a single writer. The same may be 
said of them in France, their native soil, with perhaps a solitary ex- 
ception in the modern imitations by La Fontaine, himself inimitable. 
* This learned Italian is now employed in completing the unfinished 
history of M. Ginguene. With deference to the opinions of the author 
of the " Osservazioni" (vide pp. 115, 116), we think he has shown in it 
a more independent and impartial criticism than his predecessor. His 
own countrymen seem to be of the same opinion, and'in a recent flat- 
tering notice of his work they have qualified their general encomium 
with more than one rebuke on the severity of his strictures. Vide 
Antologia for April, 18T4. 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 589 

think a critic might we'll be excused in regarding the 
tender passion as the vivida vis of the English author. 
Let us not be misunderstood, however, as implying 
that nothing but this amorous incense escapes from 
the Italian lyric muse. To the exceptions which the 
author of the Osservazioni has enumerated, he might 
have added, had not his modesty forbidden him, as 
inferior to none, the sacred melodies which adorn his 
own autobiography ; above all, the magnificent can- 
zone on the "Death of Leopold," which can derive 
nothing from our commendation, when a critic like 
Mathias has declared it to have "secured to its author 
a place on the Italian Parnassus, by the side of Petrarch 
and Chiabrera." * 

As to our remark on the tendency of the soft Italian 
tones "to seduce their writers into an overweening 
attention to sound," we are surprised that this should 
have awakened two such grave pages of admonition 
from our censor. Why, we were speaking of 

" The Tuscan's siren tongue, 
That music in itself, whose sounds are song." 

We thought the remark had been as true as it was old. 
We cannot but think there is something in it, even 
now, as we are occasionally lost in the mellifluous re- 
dundances of Bembo or Boccaccio, those celebrated 

* A letter from Mr. Mathias, which fell into our hands some time 
since, concludes a complimentary analysis of the above canzone with 
this handsome eulogium : "After having read and reflected much on 
this wonderful production, I believe that, if Petrarch could have 
heard it, he would have assigned to its author a seat very near to his 
own, without requiring any other evidence of his vivacious, copious, 
and sublime genius." 

50 



59° 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



models of Italian eloquence. At any rate, our remark 
fell far short of the candid confession of Bettinelli, 
who, in speaking of historical writing, observes that 
"in this, as in every other department of literature, 
his countrymen have been more solicitous about style, 
and ingenious turns of thought, than utility or good 
philosophy." * 

But we must hasten to the last, not by any means 
the least, offence recorded on the roll of our enormi- 
ties. This is an ill-omened stricture on the poetical 
character of Metastasio, for which the author of the 
Osservazioni, after lavishing upon him a shower of 
golden compliments at our expense, proceeds to cen- 
sure us as "wanting in respect to this famous man; 
as perspicacious only in detecting blemishes ; as guilty 
of extravagant and unworthy expressions, which prove 
that we cannot have read or digested the works of this 
exalted dramatist, nor those of his biographers, nor of 
his critics." (Pp. 98-1 11.) And what, think you, 
gentle reader, invited these unsavory rebukes, with 
the dozen pages of panegyrical accompaniment on his 
predecessor? "The melodious rhythm of Tasso's verse 
has none of the monotonous sweetness so cloying in Metas- 
tasio.'''' In this italicized line lies the whole of our 
offending; no more. 

We shall consult the comfort of our readers by 
disposing of this point as briefly as possible. We 
certainly do not feel, and we will not affect, that 
profound veneration for Metastasio which the author 
of the Osservazioni professes, and which may have 
legitimately descended to him with the inheritance of 

* Risorgimento d'ltalia, Introduz., torn. i. p. 14. 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



59* 



the Cesarean laurel. We have always looked upon 
his operas as exhibiting an effeminacy of sentiment, a 
violent contrivance of incident, and an extravagance 
of character, that are not wholly to be vindicated by 
the constitution of the Musical Drama. But nothing 
of all this was intimated in our unfortunate suggestion; 
and, as we are unwilling to startle anew the principles 
or prejudices of our highly respectable censor, we shall 
content ourselves with bringing into view one or two 
stout authorities, behind whom we might have in- 
trenched ourselves, and resign the field to him. 

The author has presented his readers with an abstract 
of about forty pages of undiluted commendation on 
his favorite poet, by the Spaniard Arteaga. We have 
no objection to this ; but, while he recommends them 
as the opinions of "a learned, judicious, and indu- 
bitably impartial critic," we think it would have been 
fair to temper these forty pages of commendation with 
some allusion to five-and -thirty pages of almost unmit- 
igated censure which immediately follow them.* In 
the course of this censorious analysis, it may be noticed 
that the "impartial Arteaga," speaking of the com- 
mon imputation of monotony in the structure of Metas- 
tases verse, and of his periods, far from acquitting him, 
expressly declines passing judgment upon it. 

But we may find ample countenance for our "irrev- 
erent opinion" in that of Ugo Foscolo, a name of 
high consideration both as a poet and a critic, and 
whom, for his perspicacity in the latter vocation, our 
author, on another occasion, has himself cited and 
eulogized as his " magnus Apollo." Speaking inci- 

* Le Rivoluzioni del Teatro musicale, etc., pp. 375, 410. 



592 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



dentally of Metastasio, he observes, "To please the 
court of Vienna, the musicians, and the public of his 
day, and to gratify the delicacy of his own feminine 
taste, Metastasio has reduced his language and versifi- 
cation to so limited a 7iumber of words, phrases, and 
cadences that they seem always the same, and in the end 
produce only the effect of a flute, which conveys rather 
delightful melody than quick and distinct sensations." * 
To precisely the same effect speaks W. A. Schlegel, in 
his eighth lecture on Dramatic Literature, whose ac- 
knowledged excellence in this particular department 
of criticism may induce us to quote him, although a 
foreigner. These authorities are too pertinent and ex- 
plicit to require the citation of any other, or to make it 
necessary, by a prolix but easy enumeration of extracts 
from the poet, more fully to establish our position. 

" Hie aliquid plus 
Quam satis est." 

We believe we are quite as weary as our readers of 
the very disagreeable office of dwelling on the defects 
of a literature so beautiful, and for which we feel so 
sincere an admiration, as the Italian. The severe im- 
peachment made, both upon the spirit and the sub- 
stance of our former remarks, by so accomplished a 
scholar as the author of the Osservazioni, has necessa- 
rily compelled us to this course in self-defence. The 
tedious parade of citations must be excused by the 
necessity of buoying up our opinions in debatable 
matters of taste by those whose authority alone our 
censor is disposed to admit, — that of his own country- 

* Essays on Petrarch, p. 93. 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 593 

men. He has emphatically repeated his distrust of the 
capacity of foreigners to decide upon subjects of liter- 
ary taste ; yet the extraordinary diversity of opinion 
manifest between him and those eminent authorities 
whom we have quoted might lead us to anticipate but 
little correspondence in the national criticism. An 
acquaintance with Italian history will not serve to di- 
minish our suspicions; and the feuds which, from the 
learned but querulous scholars of the fifteenth century 
to those of our own time, have divided her republic 
of letters, have not been always carried on with the 
bloodless weapons of scholastic controversy.* 

That some assertions too unqualified, some errors or 
prejudices, should have escaped, in the course of fifty 
or sixty pages of remark, is to be expected from the 
most circumspect pen ; but a benevolent critic, instead 
of fastening upon these, will embrace the spirit of the 
whole, and by this interpret and excuse any specific 
inaccuracy. It may not be easy to come up to the 
standard of our author's principles, it may be his par- 
tialities, in estimating the intellectual character of his 
country; but we think we can detect one source of his 
dissatisfaction with us, in his misconception of our 
views, which, according to him, were that "a, partic- 
ular knowledge of the Italian should be widely diffused 

* Take two familiar examples : that of Caro and that of Marini. 
The adversary of the former poet, accused of murder, heresy, etc., 
was condemned by the Inquisition, and compelled to seek his safety 
in exile. The adversary of Marini, in an attempt to assassinate him, 
fortunately shot only a courtier of the King of Sardinia. In both 
cases, the wits of Italy, ranged under opposite banners, fought with 
incredible acrimony during the greater part of a century. The sub- 
ject of fierce dispute, in both instances, was a sonnet ! 

5°* 



594 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



in America." This he quotes and requotes with pecu- 
liar emphasis, objecting it to us as perfectly inconsist- 
ent with our style of criticism. Now, in the first place, 
we made no such declaration. We intended only to 
give a veracious analysis of one branch of Italian let- 
ters. But, secondly, had such been our design, we 
doubt exceedingly, or rather we do not doubt, whether 
the best way of effecting it would be by indiscriminate 
panegyric. The amplification of beauties, and the 
prudish concealment of all defects, would carry with 
it an air of insincerity that must dispose the mind of 
every ingenuous reader to reject it. Perfection is not 
the lot of humanity more in Italy than elsewhere. 
Such intemperate panegyric is, moreover, unworthy of 
the great men who are the objects of it. They really 
shine with too brilliant a light to be darkened by a 
few spots ; and to be tenacious of their defects is in 
some measure to distrust their genius. Rien rf est beau 
que le vrai, is the familiar reflection of a critic whose 
general maxims in his art are often more sound than 
their particular application. 

Notwithstanding the difficulty urged by Mr. Da Ponte 
of forming a correct estimate of a foreign language, the 
science of general literary criticism and history, which 
may be said to have entirely grown up within the last 
fifty years, has done much to eradicate prejudice and 
enlarge the circle of genuine knowledge. A century 
and a half ago, " the best of English critics," * in the 
opinion of Pope and Dryden, could institute a formal 

* " The Tragedies of the Last Age, considered and examined by 
the Practice of the Ancients," etc. By Thomas Rymer. London, 
1678. 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 595 

examination, and, of course, condemnation, of the 
plays of Shakspeare "by the practice of the ancients." 
The best of French critics,* in the opinion of every 
one, could condemn the "Orlando Furioso" for wan- 
dering from the rules of Horace ; even Addison, in 
his triumphant vindication of the "Paradise Lost," 
seems most solicitous to prove its conformity with the 
laws of Aristotle ; and a writer like Lope de Vega felt 
obliged to apologize for the independence with which 
he deviated from the dogmas of the same school and 
adapted his beautiful inventions in the drama to the 
peculiar genius of his own countrymen. f The mag- 
nificent fables of Ariosto and Spenser were stigmatized 
as barbarous, because they were not classical ; and the 
polite scholars of Europe sneered at "the bad taste 
which could prefer an 'Ariosto to a Virgil, a Romance 
to an Iliad.' "J But the reconciling spirit of modern 
criticism has interfered ; the character, the wants of 

* " Dissertation critique sur l'Aventure de Joconde." GEuvres de 
Boileau, torn. ii. 
f " Arte de hacer Comedias." Obras sueltas, torn. iv. p. 406. 

" Y quando he de escribir una Comedia, 
Encierro los preceptos con seis Haves ; 
Saco a Terencio y Plauto de mi estudio, 
Para que no me den voces, que suele 
Dar gritos la verdad en libros mudos," etc. 

\ See Lord Shaftesbury's " Advice to an Author ;" a treatise of great 
authority in its day, but which could speak of the "Gothic Muse of 
Shakspeare, Fletcher, and Milton as lisping with stammering tongues, 
that nothing but the youth and rawness of the age could excuse!" 
Sir William Temple, with a purer taste, is not more liberal. The 
term Gothic, with these writers, is applied to much the same subjects 
with the modern term Romantic, with this difference : the latter is 
simply distinctive, while the former was also an opprobrious epithet. 



596 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

different nations and ages have been consulted; from 
the local beauties peculiar to each, the philosophic in- 
quirer has deduced certain general principles of beauty 
applicable to all ; petty national prejudices have been 
extinguished ; and a difference of taste, which for that 
reason alone was before condemned as a deformity, is 
now admired as a beautiful variety in the order of 
nature. 

The English, it must be confessed, can take little 
credit to themselves for this improvement. Their re- 
searches in literary history amount to little in their 
own language, and to nothing in any other. Warton, 
Johnson, and Campbell have indeed furnished an ac- 
curate inventory of their poetical wealth; but, except 
it be in the limited researches of Drake and of Dun- 
lop, what record have we of all their rich and various 
prose? As to foreign literature, while other cultivated 
nations have been developing their views in volumi- 
nous and valuable treatises, the English have been pro- 
foundly mute.* Yet for several reasons they might be 

® The late translation of " Sismondi's Southern Europe" is the only- 
one, we believe, which the English possess of a detailed literary his- 
tory. The discriminating taste of this sensible Frenchman has been 
liberalized by his familiarity with the languages of the North. His 
knowledge, however, is not always equal to his subject, and the credit 
of his opinions is not unfrequently due to another. The historian of 
the " Italian Republics" may be supposed to be at home in treating 
of Italian letters, and this is undoubtedly the strongest part of his 
work; but in what relates to Spain he has helped himself " manibus 
plenis" from Boutervvek, much too liberally, indeed, for the scanty 
acknowledgments made by him to the accurate and learned German. 
Page upon page is literally translated from him. Sismondi's work, 
however, is intrinsically valuable for its philosophical illustrations of 
the character of the Spaniards by the peculiarities of their literature. 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



597 



expected to make the best general critics in the world, 
and the collision of their judgments in this matter 
with those of the other European scholars might pro- 
duce new and important results. 

The author of the Osservazioni has accused us of 
being too much under the influence of his enemies the 
French (p. 112). There are slender grounds for this 
imputation. We have always looked upon this fas- 
tidious people as the worst general critics possible; 
and we scarcely once alluded to their opinions in the 
course of our article without endeavoring to contro- 
vert them. The truth is, while they have contrived 
their own system with infinite skill, and are exceed- 
ingly acute in detecting the least violation of it, they 
seem incapable of understanding why it should not 
be applied to every other people, however opposite 
its character from their own. The consequence is 
obvious. Voltaire, whose elevated views sometimes 
advanced him to the level of the generous criticism 
of our own day, is by no means an exception. His 
Commentaries on Corneille are filled with the finest 
reflections imaginable on that eminent poet, or, rather, 
on the French drama; but the application of these 
same principles to the productions of his neighbors 
leads him into the grossest absurdities. "Addison's 
Cato is the only well-written tragedy in England." 
"Hamlet is a barbarous production, that would not be 

His analysis of the national drama, as opposed to that of Schlegel, is 
also extremely ingenious. Is it not more sound than that of the 
German? We trust that this hitherto untrodden field in our language 
will be entered before long by one of our own scholars, whose re- 
searches have enabled him to go much more extensively into the 
Spanish department than either of his predecessors. 



59 S BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

endured by the meanest populace in France or Italy." 
"Lope de Vega and Calderon familiarized their coun- 
trymen with all the extravagances of a gross and ridicu- 
lous drama." But the French theatre, modelled upon 
the ancient Greek, can boast "of more than twenty 
pieces which surpass their most admirable chef-ci ' ceu- 
vres, without excepting those of Sophocles or Euripi- 
des." So in other walks of poetry, Milton, Tasso, 
Ercilla, occasionally fare no better. "Who would 
dare to talk to Boileau, Racine, Moliere, of an epic 
poem upon Adam and Eve?" Voltaire had one addi- 
tional reason for the exaltation of his native literature 
at the expense of every other : he was himself at the 
head, or aspired to be, of every department in it. 

Madame de Stael is certainly an eminent exception, 
in very many particulars, to the general character of 
her nation. Her defects, indeed, are rather of an op- 
posite cast. Instead of the narrowness of conventional 
precept, she may be sometimes accused of vague and 
visionary theory; instead of nice specific details, of 
dealing too freely in abstract and independent propo- 
sitions. Her faults are of the German school, which 
she may have in part imbibed from her intimacy with 
their literature (no common circumstance with her 
countrymen), from her residence in Germany, and 
from her long intimacy with one of its most distin- 
guished scholars, who lived under the same roof with 
her for many years. But, with all her faults, she is 
entitled to the praise of having shown a more enlarged 
and truly philosophical spirit of criticism than any of 
her countrymen. 

The English have never yielded to the arbitrary 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 599 

legislation of academies ; their literature has at differ- 
ent periods exhibited all the varieties of culture which 
have prevailed over the other European tongues ; and 
their language, derived both from the Latin and the 
Teutonic idiom, affords them a much greater facility 
for entering into the spirit of foreign letters than can 
be enjoyed by any other European people, whose lan- 
guage is derived almost exclusively from one or the 
other of these elements. With all these peculiar facil- 
ities for literary history and criticism, why, with their 
habitual freedom of thought, have they remained in it 
so far behind most other cultivated nations ? 



SPANISH LITERATURE.* 

(January, 1852.) 

Literary history is the least familiar kind of his- 
torical writing. It is, in some respects, the most diffi- 
cult, requiring certainly far the most laborious study. 
The facts for civil history we gather from personal ex- 
perience, or from the examination of a comparatively 
few authors, whose statements the historian transfers, 
with such modification and commentary as he pleases, 
to his own pages. But in literary history the books 
are the facts, and pretty substantial ones in many cases, 
which are not to be mastered at a glance, or on the 
report of another. It is a tedious process to read 
through a library in order to decide that the greater 
part is probably not worth reading at all. 

Literary history must come late in the intellectual 
development of a nation. It is the history of books, 
and there can be no history of books till books are 
written. It presupposes, moreover, a critical knowl- 
edge, — an acquaintance with the principles of taste, 
which can come only from a wide study and compari- 
son of models. It is, therefore, necessarily the product 
of an advanced state of civilization and mental culture. 

Although criticism, in one form or another, was 
studied and exemplified by the ancients, yet they 

* " History of Spanish Literature." By George Tieknor. New 
York : Harper & Brothers. 1849 : 3 vols. 8vo. 
( 600 ) 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 60 r 

made no progress in direct literary history. Neither 
has it been cultivated by all the nations of modern 
Europe. At least, in some of them it -has met with 
very limited success. In England, one might have 
thought, from the free scope given to the expression 
of opinion, it would have flourished beyond all other 
countries. But Italy, and even Spain, with all the 
restraint imposed on intellectual movement, have done 
more in this way than the whole Anglo-Saxon race. 
The very freedom with which the English could enter 
on the career of political action has not only with- 
drawn them from the more quiet pursuits of letters, 
but has given them a decided taste for descriptions of 
those stirring scenes in which they or their fathers 
have taken part. Hence the great preponderance with 
them, as with us, of civil history over literary. 

It may be further remarked that the monastic in- 
stitutions of Roman Catholic countries have been pe- 
culiarly favorable to this, as to some other kinds of 
composition. The learned inmates of the cloister have 
been content to solace their leisure with those literary 
speculations and inquiries which had no immediate 
connection with party excitement and the turmoils of 
the world. The best literary histories, from whatever 
cause, in Spain and in Italy, have been the work of 
members of some one or other of the religious frater- 
nities. 

Still another reason of the attention given to this 
study in most of those countries may be found in the 
embarrassments existing there to the general pursuit of 
science, which have limited the powers to the more 
exclusive cultivation of works of imagination, and 

2 A 51 



602 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

those other productions of elegant literature that come 
most properly within the province of taste and of 
literary criticism. 

Yet in England, during the last generation, in which 
the mind has been unusually active, if there have been 
few elaborate works especially devoted to criticism, the 
electric fluid has been imperceptibly carried off from a 
thousand minor points, in the form of essays and pe- 
riodical reviews, which cover nearly the whole ground 
of literary inquiry, both foreign and domestic. The 
student who has the patience to consult these scattered 
notices, if he cannot find a system ready made to his 
hands, may digest one for himself by a comparison of 
contradictory judgments on every topic under review. 
Yet it may be doubted if the multitude of cross-lights 
thrown at random over his path will not serve rather 
to perplex than to enlighten him. 

Wherever we are to look for the reasons, the fact 
will hardly be disputed, that, since Warton's learned 
fragment, no general literary history has been produced 
in England which is likely to endure, with the excep- 
tion of Hallam's late work, that, under the modest 
title of an "Introduction," gives a general survey of 
the scientific and literary culture of Europe during 
three centuries. If the English have done so little in 
this way for their own literature, it can hardly be ex- 
pected that they should do much for that of their 
neighbors. If they had extended their researches to 
the Continent, it might probably have been in the 
direction of Spain ; for no country has been made 
with them the subject of so large historical investiga- 
tion. One or two good histories devoted to Italy and 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 603 

Germany, as many to the revolutionary period of France 
— the country with which they are most nearly brought 
into contact — make up the sum of what is of positive 
value in this way. But for Spain, a series of writers — 
Robertson, Watson, Dunlop, Lord Mahon, Coxe, some 
of the highest order, all respectable — have exhibited 
the political annals of the monarchy under the Aus- 
trian and Bourbon dynasties. Even at the present 
moment, a still livelier interest seems to be awakened 
to the condition of this romantic land. Two excel- 
lent works, by Head and by Stirling, — the latter of 
especial value, — have made the world acquainted, for 
the first time, with the rich treasures of art in the Pen- 
insula. And last, not least, Ford, in his Hand-book 
and other works, has joined to a curious erudition that 
knowledge of the Spanish character and domestic in- 
stitutions that can be obtained only from singular acute- 
ness of observation combined with a long residence in 
the country he describes. 

Spain, too, has been the favorite theme of more 
than one of our own writers, in history and romance ; 
and now the long list is concluded by the attempt of 
the work before us to trace the progress of intellectual 
culture in the Peninsula. 

No work on a similar extended plan is to be found 
in Spain itself. Their own literary histories have been 
chiefly limited to the provinces, or to particular de- 
partments of letters. We may except, indeed, the 
great work of Father Andres, which, comprehending 
the whole circle of European science and literature, 
left but a comparatively small portion to his own 
country. To his name may also be added that of 



604 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

Lampillas, whose work, however, from its rambling 
and its controversial character, throws but a very par- 
tial and unsatisfactory glance on the topics which he 
touches. 

The only books on a similar plan, which cover the 
same ground with the one before us, are the histories 
of Bouterwek and Sismondi. The former was written 
as part of a great plan for the illustration of European 
art and science since the revival of learning, — pro- 
jected by a literary association in Gottingen. The 
plan, as is too often the case in such copartnerships, 
was very imperfectly executed. The best fruits of it 
were the twelve volumes of Bouterwek, on the elegant 
literature of modern Europe. That of Spain occupies 
one of these volumes. 

It is written with acuteness, perspicuity, and candor. 
Notwithstanding the writer is perhaps too much under 
the influence of certain German theories then fashion- 
able, his judgments, in the main, are temperate and 
sound, and he is entitled to great credit as the earliest 
pioneer in this untrodden field of letters. The great 
defect in the book is the want of proper materials on 
which to rest these judgments. Of this the writer 
more than once complains. It is a capital defect, not 
to be compensated by any talent or diligence in the 
author. For in this kind of writing, as we have said, 
books are facts, the very stuff out of which the history 
is to be made. 

Bouterwek had command of the great library of 
Gottingen. But it would not be safe to rely on any 
one library, however large, for supplying all the ma- 
terials for an extended literary history. Above all, 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 605 

this is true of Spanish literature. The difficulty of 
making a literary collection in Spain is far greater 
than in most other parts of Europe. The booksellers' 
trade there is a very different affair from what it is in 
more favored regions. The taste for reading is not, 
or, rather, has not been, sufficiently active to create a 
demand for the republication always of even the best 
authors, the ancient editions of whose works have be- 
come scarce and most difficult to be procured. The 
impediment to a free expression of opinion has con- 
demned many more works to the silence of manuscript. 
And these manuscripts are preserved, or, to say truth, 
buried, in the collections of old families, or of public 
institutions, where it requires no ordinary interest with 
the proprietors, private or public, to be allowed to dis- 
inter them. Some of the living Spanish scholars are 
now busily at work in these useful explorations, the 
result of which they are giving, from time to time, to 
the world in the form of livraisons or numbers, which 
seem likely to form an important contribution to his- 
torical science. For the impulse thus given to these 
patriotic labors the world is mainly indebted to the 
late venerable Navarrete, who, in his own person, led 
the way by the publication of a series of important 
historical documents. It is only from these obscure 
and uncertain repositories, and from booksellers' stalls, 
that the more rare and recondite works in which Spain 
is so rich can be procured; and it is only under great 
advantages that the knowledge of their places of de- 
posit can be obtained, and that, having obtained it, 
the works can be had, at a price proportioned to their 
rarity. The embarrassments caused by this circum- 

51* 



606 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

stance have been greatly diminished under the more 
liberal spirit of the present day, which on a few oc- 
casions has even unlocked the jealous archives of 
Simancas, that Robertson, backed by the personal 
authority of the British ambassador, strove in vain to 
penetrate. 

Spanish literature occupies also one volume of Sis- 
mondi's popular work on the culture of Southern 
Europe. But Sismondi was far less instructed in lit- 
erary criticism than his German predecessor, of whose 
services he has freely availed himself in the course of 
his work. Indeed, he borrows from him not merely 
thoughts, but language, translating from the German 
page after page and incorporating it with his own elo- 
quent commentary. He does not hesitate to avow his 
obligations ; but they prove at once his own deficien- 
cies in the performance of his critical labors as well as 
in the possession of the requisite materials. Sismondi's 
ground was civil history, whose great lessons no one 
had meditated more deeply; and it is in the applica- 
tion of these lessons to the character of the Spaniards, 
and in tracing the influence of that character on their 
literature, that a great merit of his work consists. He 
was, moreover, a Frenchman, — or, at least, a French- 
man in language and education ; and he was prepared, 
therefore, to correct some of the extravagant theories 
of the German critics, and to rectify some of their 
judgments by a moral standard which they had en- 
tirely overlooked in their passion for the beautiful. 

With all his merits, however, and the additional 
grace of a warm and picturesque style, his work, like 
that of Bouterwek, must be admitted to afford only 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 607 

the outlines of the great picture, which they have left 
to other hands to fill up in detail and on a far more 
extended plan. To accomplish this great task is the 
purpose of the volumes before us; we are now to in- 
quire with what result. But, before entering on the 
inquiry, we will give some account of the preparatory 
training of the writer, and the materials which he has 
brought together. 

Mr. Ticknor, who now first comes before the world 
in the avowed character of an author, has long enjoyed 
a literary reputation which few authors who have closed 
their career might not envy. While quite a young man, 
he was appointed to fill the chair of Modern Litera- 
ture in Harvard College, on the foundation of the 
late Abiel Smith, Esq., a distinguished merchant of 
Boston. When he received the appointment, Mr. Tick- 
nor had been some time in Europe pursuing studies 
in philology. He remained there two or three years 
afterwards, making an absence of above four years 
in all. A part of this period was passed in diligent 
study at Gottingen. In Paris he explored, under able 
teachers, the difficult Romance dialects, the medium 
of the beautiful Provencal. 

During his residence in Spain he perfected himself 
in the Castilian, and established an intimacy with her 
most eminent scholars, who aided him in the collection 
of rare books and manuscripts, to which he assiduously 
devoted himself. It is a proof of the literary considera- 
tion which, even at that early age, he had obtained in 
the society of Madrid, that he was elected a correspond- 
ing member of the Royal Academy of History. His 
acquisitions in the early literature of modern Europe 



608 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

attracted the notice of Sir Walter Scott, who, in a 
letter to Southey, printed in Lockhart's Life, speaks 
of his young guest (Mr. Ticknor was then at Abbots- 
ford) as a "wonderful fellow for romantic lore." 

On his return home, Mr. Ticknor entered at once 
on his academic labors, and delivered a series of lec- 
tures on the Castilian and French literatures, as well 
as on some portions of the English, before successive 
classes, which he continued to repeat, with the occa- 
sional variation of oral instruction, during the fifteen 
years he remained at the University. 

We well remember the sensation produced on the 
first delivery of these Lectures, which served to break 
down the barrier which had so long confined the stu- 
dent to a converse with antiquity; they opened to him 
a free range among those great masters of modern lit- 
erature who had hitherto been veiled in the obscurity 
of a foreign idiom. The influence of this instruction 
was soon visible in the higher education as well as the 
literary ardor shown by the graduates. So decided was 
the impulse thus given to the popular sentiment that 
considerable apprehension was felt lest modern litera- 
ture was to receive a disproportionate share of atten- 
tion in the scheme of collegiate education. 

After the lapse of fifteen years so usefully employed, 
Mr. Ticknor resigned his office, and, thus released from 
his academic labors, paid a second visit to Europe, 
where, in a second residence of three years, he much 
enlarged the amount and the value of his literary col- 
lection. In the more perfect completion of this he 
was greatly assisted by the professor of Arabic in the 
University of Madrid, Don Pascual de Gayangos, a 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 609 

scholar to whose literary sympathy and assistance more 
than one American writer has been indebted, and who 
to a profound knowledge of Oriental literature unites 
one equally extensive in the European. 

With these aids, and his own untiring efforts, Mr. 
Ticknor succeeded in bringing together a body of 
materials in print and manuscript, for the illustration 
of the Castilian, such as probably has no rival either 
in public or private collections. This will be the more 
readily believed when we find that nearly every author 
employed in the composition of this great work — with 
the exception of a few, for which he has made ample 
acknowledgments — is to be found on his own shelves. 
We are now to consider in what manner he has availed 
himself of this inestimable collection of materials. 

The title of the book — the "History of Spanish 
Literature" — is intended to comprehend all that re- 
lates to the poetry of the country, its romances, and 
works of imagination of every sort, its criticism and 
eloquence, — in short, whatever can be brought under 
the head of elegant literature. Even its chronicles 
and regular histories are included ; for, though scien- 
tific in their import, they are still, in respect to their 
style and their execution as works of art, brought into 
the department of ornamental writing. In Spain, free- 
dom of thought, or, at least, the free expression of it, 
has been so closely fettered that science, in its strictest 
sense, has made little progress in that unhappy coun- 
try, and a history of its elegant literature is, more than 
in any other land, a general history of its intellectual 
progress. 

The work is divided into three great periods, hav- 

2 A* 



610 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

ing reference to time rather than to any philosophical 
arrangement. Indeed, Spanish literature affords less 
facilities for such an arrangement than the literature of 
many other countries, as that of England and of Italy, 
for example, where, from different causes, there have 
been periods exhibiting literary characteristics that 
stamp them with a peculiar physiognomy. For ex- 
ample, in England we have the age of Elizabeth, the 
age of Queen Anne, our own age. In Italy, the philo- 
sophical arrangement seems to correspond well enough 
with the chronological. Thus, the Trecentisti, the 
Seicentisti, convey ideas as distinct and as independent 
of each other as the different schools of Italian art. 
But in Spain, literature is too deeply tinctured at its 
fountain-head not to retain somewhat of the primi- 
tive coloring through the whole course of its descent. 
Patriotism, chivalrous loyalty, religious zeal, under 
whatever modification and under whatever change of 
circumstances, have constituted, as Mr. Ticknor has 
well insisted, the enduring elements of the national 
literature. And it is this obvious preponderance of 
these elements throughout which makes the distribu- 
tion into separate masses on any philosophical prin- 
ciple extremely difficult. A proof of this is afforded 
by the arrangement now adopted by Mr. Ticknor him- 
self, in the limit assigned to his first period, which is 
considerably shorter than that assigned to it in his 
original Lectures. The alteration, as we shall take 
occasion to notice hereafter, is, in our judgment, a 
decided improvement. 

The first great division embraces the whole time 
from the earliest appearance of a written document in 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 611 

the Castilian to the commencement of the sixteenth 
century, the reign of Charles the Fifth, — a period of 
nearly four centuries. 

At the very outset we are met by the remarkable 
poem of the Cid, that primitive epic, which, like the 
Nieblungenlied or the Iliad, stands as the traditional 
legend of an heroic age, exhibiting all the freshness 
and glow which belong to the morning of a nation's 
existence. The name of the author, as is often the 
case with those memorials of the olden time, when the 
writer thought less of himself than of his work, has 
not come down to us. Even the date of its composi- 
tion is uncertain, — probably before the year 1200; a 
century earlier than the poem of Dante ; a century 
and a half before Petrarch and Chaucer. The subject 
of it, as its name imports, is the achievements of the 
renowned Ruy Diaz de Bivar, — the Cid, the Campeador, 
"the lord, the champion," as he was fondly styled by 
his countrymen, as well as by his Moorish foes, in com- 
memoration of his prowess, chiefly displayed against 
the infidel. The versification is the fourteen-syllable 
measure, artless, and exhibiting all the clmracteristics 
of an unformed idiom, but, with its rough melody, 
well suited to the expression of the warlike and stir- 
ring incidents in which it abounds. It is impossible 
to peruse it without finding ourselves carried back to 
the heroic age of Castile; and we feel that in its simple 
and cordial portraiture of existing manners we get a 
more vivid impression of the feudal period than is to 
be gathered from the more formal pages of the chron- 
icler. Heeren has pronounced that the poems of Homer 
were one of the principal bonds which held the Gre- 



612 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

cian states together. The assertion may seem extrava- 
gant; but we can well understand that a poem like 
that of the Cid, with all its defects as a work of art, 
by its proud historic recollections of an heroic age 
should do much to nourish the principle of patriotism 
in the bosoms of the people. 

From the "Cid" Mr. Ticknor passes to the review 
of several other poems of the thirteenth and some of 
the fourteenth century. They are usually of consider- 
able length. The Castilian muse, at the outset, seems 
to have delighted in works of longue haleine. Some of 
them are of a satirical character, directing their shafts 
against the clergy, with an independence which seems 
to have marked also the contemporaneous productions 
of other nations, but which, in Spain at least, was 
rarely found at a later period. Others of these ven- 
erable productions are tinged with the religious big- 
otry which enters so largely into the best portions of 
the Castilian literature. 

One of the most remarkable poems of the period is 
the Danza General, — the "Dance of Death." The 
subject is not original with the Spaniards, and has been 
treated by the bards of other nations in the elder time. 
It represents the ghastly revels of the dread monarch, 
to which all are summoned, of every degree, from the 
potentate to the peasant. 

"It is founded on the well-known fiction, so often 
illustrated both in painting and in verse during the 
Middle Ages, that all men, of all conditions, are sum- 
moned to the Dance of Death ; a kind of spiritual 
masquerade, in which the different ranks of society, 
from the Pope to the young child, appear dancing with 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 613 

the skeleton form of Death. In this Spanish version 
it is striking and picturesque, — more so, perhaps, than 
in any other, — the ghastly nature of the subject being 
brought into a very lively contrast with the festive tone 
of the verses, which frequently recalls some of the 
better parts of those flowing stories that now and then 
occur in the ' Mirror for Magistrates.' 

"The first seven stanzas of the Spanish poem con- 
stitute a prologue, in which Death issues his summons 
partly in his own person, and partly in that of a 
preaching friar, ending thus : 

" ' Come to the Dance of Death, all ye whose fate 

By birth is mortal, be ye great or small ; 
And willing come, nor loitering, nor late, 

Else force shall bring you struggling to my thrall : 

For since yon friar hath uttered loud his call 
To penitence and godliness sincere, 
He that delays must hope no waiting here ; 

For still the cry is, Haste ! and, Haste to all !' 

"Death now proceeds, as in the old pictures and 
poems, to summon, first the Pope, then cardinals, 
kings, bishops, and so on, down to day-laborers ; all 
of whom are forced to join his mortal dance, though 
each first makes some remonstrance that indicates sur- 
prise, horror, or reluctance. The call to youth and 
beauty is spirited : 

" ' Bring to my dance, and bring without delay, 

Those damsels twain you see so bright and fair ; 
They came, but came not in a willing way, 
To list my chants of mortal grief and care : 
Nor shall the flowers and roses fresh they wear, 
Nor rich attire, avail their forms to save. 
They strive in vain who strive against the grave ; 
It may not be ; my wedded brides they are.' 
52 



6T4 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

Another poem, of still higher pretensions, but, like 
the last, still in manuscript, is the Poema de Jose, — 
the "Poem of Joseph." It is probably the work of 
one of those Spanish Arabs who remained under the 
Castilian domination after the great body of their 
countrymen had retreated. It is written in the Cas- 
tilian dialect, but in Arabic characters, as was not very 
uncommon with the writings of the Moriscoes. The 
story of Joseph is told, moreover, conformably to the 
version of the Koran, instead of that of the Hebrew 
Scriptures. 

The manner in which the Spanish and the Arabic 
races were mingled together after the great invasion 
produced a strange confusion in their languages. The 
Christians, who were content to dwell in their old 
places under the Moslem rule, while they retained 
their own language, not unfrequently adopted the 
alphabetical characters of their conquerors. Even 
the coins struck by some of the ancient Castilian 
princes, as they recovered their territory from the 
invaders, were stamped with Arabic letters. Not un- 
frequently the archives and municipal records of the 
Spanish cities, for a considerable time after their 
restoration to their own princes, were also written in 
Arabic characters. On the other hand, as the great 
inundation gradually receded, the Moors who lingered 
behind under the Spanish sway often adopted the lan- 
guage of their conquerors, but retained their own writ- 
ten alphabet. In other words, the Christians kept 
their language and abandoned their alphabetical char- 
acters; while the Moslems kept their alphabetical char- 
acters and abandoned their language. The contrast 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 615 

is curious, and may perhaps be accounted for by the 
fact that the superiority conceded by the Spaniards to 
the Arabic literature in this early period led the few- 
scholars among them to adopt, for their own composi- 
tions, the characters in which that literature was writ- 
ten. The Moriscoes, on the other hand, did what was 
natural when they retained their peculiar writing, to 
which they had been accustomed in the works of their 
countrymen, while they conformed to the Castilian 
language, to which they had become accustomed in 
daily intercourse with the Spaniard. However ex- 
plained, the fact is curious. But it is time w r e should 
return to the Spanish Arab poem. 

We give the following translation of some of its 
verses by Mr. Ticknor, with his few prefatory remarks : 

"On the first night after the outrage, Jusuf, as he 
is called in the poem, when travelling along in charge 
of a negro, passes a cemetery on a hill-side where his 
mother lies buried. 

" And when the negro heeded not, that guarded him behind, 
From off the camel Jusuf sprang, on which he rode confined, 
And hastened, with all speed, his mother's grave to find, 
Where he knelt and pardon sought, to relieve his troubled mind. 

" He cried, ' God's grace be with thee still, O Lady mother dear ! 
O mother, you would sorrow, if you looked upon me here ; 
For my neck is bound with chains, and I live in grief and fear, 
Like a traitor by my brethren sold, like a captive to the spear. 

" ' They have sold me ! they have sold me ! though I never did them 

harm; 
They have torn me from my father, from his strong and living arm, 
By art and cunning they enticed me, and by falsehood's guilty 

charm, 
And I go a base-bought captive, full of sorrow and alarm.' 



616 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

" But now the negro looked about, and knew that he was gone ; 
For no man could be seen, and the camel came alone ; 
So he turned his sharpened ear, and caught the wailing tone, 
Where Jusuf, by his mother's grave, lay making heavy moan. 

" And the negro hurried up, and gave him there a blow ; 
So quick and cruel was it, that it instant laid him low: 
'A base-born wretch,' he cried aloud, 'a base-born thief art thou: 
Thy masters, when we purchased thee, they told us it was so.' 

" But Jusuf answered straight, ' Nor thief nor wretch am I ; 
My mother's grave is this, and for pardon here I cry ; 
I cry to Allah's power, and send my prayer on high, 
That, since I never wronged thee, his curse may on thee lie.' 

" And then all night they travelled on, till dawned the coming day, 
When the land was sore tormented with a whirlwind's furious 

sway; 
The sun grew dark at noon, their hearts sunk in dismay, 
And they knew not, with their merchandise, to seek or make their 
way." 

The manuscript of the piece, containing about twelve 
hundred verses, though not entirely perfect, is in Mr. 
Ticknor's hands, with its original Arabic characters 
converted into the Castilian. He has saved it from 
the chances of time by printing it at length in his 
Appendix, accompanied by the following commenda- 
tions, which, to one practised in the old Castilian 
literature, will probably not be thought beyond its 
deserts : 

"There is little, as it seems to me, in the early 
narrative poetry of any modern nation better worth 
reading than this old Morisco version of the story of 
Joseph. Parts of it overflow with the tenderest natural 
affection ; other parts are deeply pathetic ; and every- 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 617 

where it bears the impress of the extraordinary state 
of manners and society that gave it birth. From sev- 
eral passages, it may be inferred that it was publicly 
recited ; and even now, as we read it, we fall uncon- 
sciously into a long-drawn chant, and seem to hear the 
voices of Arabian camel-drivers, or of Spanish mule- 
teers, as the Oriental or the romantic tone happens to 
prevail. I am acquainted with nothing in the form of 
the old metrical romance that is more attractive, — 
nothing that is so peculiar, original, and separate from 
every thing else of the same class." 

With these anonymous productions, Mr. Ticknor en- 
ters into the consideration of others from an acknowl- 
edged source, among which are those of the Prince 
Don Juan Manuel and Alfonso the Tenth, or Alfonso 
the Wise, as he is usually termed. He was one of 
those rare men who seem to be possessed of an almost 
universal genius. His tastes would have been better 
suited to a more refined period. He was, unfortu- 
nately, so far in. advance of his age that his age could 
not fully profit by .his knowledge. He was raised so 
far above the general level of his time that the light 
of his genius, though it reached to distant generations, 
left his own in a comparative obscurity. His great 
work was the code of the Siete Partidas, — little heeded 
in his own day, though destined to become the basis 
of Spanish jurisprudence both in the Old World and 
in the New. 

Alfonso caused the Bible, for the first time, to be 
translated into the Castilian. He was an historian, 
and led the way in the long line of Castilian writers in 
that department, by his Crbnica General. He aspired 

52* 



618 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

also to the laurel of the Muses. His poetry is still 
extant in the Gallician dialect, which the monarch 
thought might in the end be the cultivated dialect of 
his kingdom. The want of a settled capital, or, to 
speak more correctly, the want of civilization, had left 
the different elements of the language contending, as 
it were, for the mastery. The result was still uncertain 
at the close of the thirteenth century. Alfonso him- 
self did, probably, more than any other to settle it, by 
his prose compositions, — by the Siete Partidas and his 
Chronicle, as well as by the vernacular version of the 
Scriptures. The Gallician became the basis of the 
language of the sister-kingdom of Portugal, and the 
generous dialect of Castile became, in Spain, the lan- 
guage of the court and of literature. 

Alfonso directed his attention also to mathematical 
science. His astronomical observations are held in 
respect at the present day. But, as Mariana sarcas- 
tically intimates, while he was gazing at the stars he 
forgot the earth, and lost his kingdom. His studious 
temper was ill accommodated to the stirring character 
of the times. He was driven from his throne by his 
factious nobles; and in a letter written not long before 
his death, of which Mr. Ticknor gives a translation, 
the unhappy monarch pathetically deplores his fate 
and the ingratitude of his subjects. Alfonso the Tenth 
seemed to have at command every science but that 
which would have been of more worth to him than 
all the rest, — the science of government. He died in 
exile, leaving behind him the reputation of being the 
wisest fool in Christendom. 

In glancing over the list of works which, from their 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 619 

anomalous character as well as their antiquity, are ar- 
ranged by Mr. Ticknor in one class, as introductory to 
his history, we are struck with the great wealth of the 
period, — not great, certainly, compared with that of 
an age of civilization, but as compared with the pro- 
ductions of most other countries in this portion of the 
Middle Ages. Much of this ancient lore, which may 
be said to constitute the foundations of the national 
literature, has been but imperfectly known to the 
Spaniards themselves; and we have to acknowledge 
our obligations to Mr. Ticknor, not only for the dili- 
gence with which he has brought it to light, but for 
the valuable commentaries, in text and notes, which 
supply all that could reasonably be demanded, both in 
a critical and bibliographical point of view. To esti- 
mate the extent of this information, we must compare 
it with what we have derived on the same subject from 
his predecessors ; where the poverty of original mate- 
rials, as well as of means for illustrating those actually 
possessed, is apparent at a glance. Sismondi, with 
some art, conceals his poverty, by making the most of 
the little finery at his command. Thus, his analysis 
of the poem of the Cid, which he had carefully read, 
together with his prose translation of no inconsider- 
able amount, covers a fifth of what he has to say on 
the whole period, embracing more than four centuries. 
He has one fine bit of gold in his possession, and he 
makes the most of it, by hammering it out into a su- 
perficial extent altogether disproportionate to its real 
value. 

Our author distributes the productions which occupy 
the greater part of the remainder of his first period 



620 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

into four great classes, — Ballads, Chronicles, Romances 
of Chivalry, and the Drama. The mere enumeration 
suggests the idea of that rude, romantic age, when 
the imagination, impatient to find utterance, breaks 
through the impediments of an unformed dialect, or, 
rather, converts it into an instrument for its purposes. 
Before looking at the results, we must briefly notice the 
circumstances under which they were effected. 

The first occupants of the Peninsula who left abiding 
traces of their peculiar civilization were the Romans. 
Six-tenths of the languages now spoken are computed 
to be derived from them. Then came the Visigoths, 
bringing with them the peculiar institutions of the 
Teutonic races. And lastly, after the lapse of three 
centuries, came the great Saracen inundation, which 
covered the whole land up to the northern mountains, 
and, as it slowly receded, left a fertilizing principle, 
that gave life to much that was good as well as evil in 
the character and literature of the Spaniards. It was 
near the commencement of the eighth century that the 
great battle was fought, on the banks of the Guada- 
lete, which decided the fate of Roderic, the last of the 
Goths, and of his monarchy. It was to the Goths — 
the Spaniards, as their descendants were called — what 
the battle of Hastings was to the English. The Arab 
conquerors rode over the country, as completely its 
masters as were the Normans of Britain. But they 
dealt more mercifully with the vanquished. The Ko- 
ran, tribute, or the sword were the terms offered by 
the victors. Many were content to remain under Mos- 
lem rule, in the tolerated enjoyment of their religion, 
and, to some extent, of their laws. Those of nobler 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 621 

metal withdrew to the rocks of the Asturias; and every 
muleteer or water-carrier who emigrates from this bar- 
ren spot glories in his birthplace as of itself a patent 
of nobility. 

Then came the struggle against the Saracen in- 
vaders, — that long crusade to be carried on for centu- 
ries, — in which the ultimate triumph of a handful of 
Christians over the large and flourishing empire of the 
Moslems is the most glorious of the triumphs of the 
Cross upon record. But it was the work of eight cen- 
turies. During the first of these the Spaniards scarcely 
ventured beyond their fastnesses. The conquerors oc- 
cupied the land, and settled in greatest strength over 
the pleasant places of the South, so congenial with 
their own voluptuous climate in the East. Then rose 
the empire of Cordova, which, under the sway of the 
Omeyades, rivalled in splendor and civilization the cal- 
iphate of Bagdad. Poetry, philosophy, letters, every- 
where flourished. Academies and gymnasiums were 
founded, and Aristotle was expounded by commenta- 
tors who acquired a glory not inferior to that of the 
Stagirite himself. This state of things continued after 
the Cordovan empire had been broken into fragments, 
when Seville, Murcia, Malaga, and the other cities 
which still flourished among the ruins continued to be 
centres of a civilization that shone bright amid the 
darkness of the Middle Ages. 

Meanwhile, the Spaniards, strong in their relig- 
ion, their Gothic institutions, and their poverty, 
had emerged from their fastnesses in the North, and 
brought their victorious banner as far as the Douro. 
In three centuries more, they had advanced their line 



622 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

of conquest only to the Tagus. But their progress, 
though slow, was irresistible, till at length the Mos- 
lems, of all their proud possessions, retained only the 
petty territory of Granada. On this little spot, how- 
ever, they made a stand for more than two centuries, 
and bade defiance to the whole Christian power ; 
while at the same time, though sunk in intellectual 
culture, they surpassed their best days in the pomp of 
their architecture and in the magnificence of living 
characteristic of the East. At the close of the fif- 
teenth century, this Arabian tale — the most splendid 
episode in the Mohammedan annals — was brought to 
an end by the fall of Granada before the arms of Fer- 
dinand and Isabella. 

Such were the strange influences which acted on the 
Spanish character, and on the earliest development 
of its literature, — influences so peculiar that it is no 
wonder they should have produced results to which no 
other part of Europe has furnished a parallel : — the 
Oriental and the European for eight centuries brought 
into contact with one another, yet, though brought 
into contact, too different in blood, laws, and religion 
ever to coalesce. Unlike the Saxons and Normans, 
who, sprung from a common stock, with a common 
faith, were gradually blended into one people, in Spain 
the conflicting elements could never mingle. No length 
of time could give the Arab a right to the soil. He 
was still an intruder. His only right was the right of 
the sword. He held his domain on the condition of 
perpetual war, — the war of race against race, of re- 
ligion against religion. This was the inheritance of 
the Spaniard, as Avell as of the Moslem, for eight bun- 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 623 

drecl years. What remarkable qualities was this situa- 
tion not calculated to call out ! — loyalty, heroism, the 
patriotic feeling, and the loftier feeling of religious en- 
thusiasm. What wonder that the soldier of the Cross 
should fancy that the arm of Heaven was stretched out 
to protect him? — that St. Jago should do battle for 
him with his celestial chivalry? — that miracles should 
cease to be miracles? — that superstition, in short, 
should be the element, the abiding element, of the 
national character? Yet this religious enthusiasm, in 
the early ages, was tempered by charity towards a foe 
whom even the Christian was compelled to respect for 
his superior civilization. But as the latter gained the 
ascendant, enthusiasm was fanned by the crafty clergy 
into fanaticism. As the Moslem scale became more 
and more depressed, fanaticism rose to intolerance, 
and intolerance ended in persecution when the victor 
was converted into the victim. It is a humiliating 
story, — more humiliating even to the oppressors than 
to the oppressed. 

The literature all the while, with chameleon-like sen- 
sibility, took the color of the times ; and it is for this 
reason that we have always dwelt with greater satisfac- 
tion on the earlier period of the national literature, 
rude though it be, with its cordial, free, and high ro- 
mantic bearing, than on the later period of its glory, 
— brilliant in an intellectual point of view, but in its 
moral aspect dark and unrelenting. 

Mr. Ticknor has been at much pains to unfold these 
peculiarities of the Castilian character, in order to ex- 
plain by them the peculiarities of the literature, and 
indeed to show their reciprocal action on- each other. 



624 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

He has devoted occasional chapters to this subject, not 
the least interesting in his volumes, making the history 
of the literature a running commentary on that of the 
nation, and thus furnishing curious information to the 
political student, no less than to the student of letters. 
His acute, and at the same time accurate, observa- 
tions, imbued with a spirit of sound philosophy, give 
the work a separate value, and raise it above the ordi- 
nary province of literary criticism. 

But it is time that we should turn to the ballads, — 
or romances, as they are called in Spain, — the first of 
the great divisions already noticed. Nowhere does 
this popular minstrelsy flourish to the same extent as 
in Spain. The condition of the country, which con- 
verted every peasant into a soldier and filled his life 
with scenes of stirring and romantic incident, may in 
part account for it. We have ballads of chivalry, of 
the national history, of the Moorish wars, mere do- 
mestic ballads, — in short, all the varieties of which 
such simple poetical narratives are susceptible. The 
most attractive of these to the Spaniards, doubtless, 
were those devoted to the national heroes. The Cid 
here occupies a large space. His love, his loyalty, his 
invincible prowess against the enemies of God, are all 
celebrated in the frank and cordial spirit of a prim- 
itive age. They have been chronologically arranged 
into a regular series, — as far as the date could be con- 
jectured, — like the Robin Hood ballads in England, 
so as to form a tolerably complete narrative of his life. 
It is interesting to observe with what fondness the 
Spaniards are ever ready to turn to their ancient hero, 
the very type of Castilian chivalry, and linked by so 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 625 

many glorious recollections with the heroic age of their 
country. 

The following version of one of these ballads, by 
Mr. Ticknor, will give a fair idea of the original. 
The time chosen is the occasion of a summons made 
by the Cid to Queen Urraca to surrender her castle, 
which held out against the arms of the warrior's sov- 
ereign, Sancho the Brave : 

" Away ! away ! proud Roderic ! 

Castilian proud, away! 
Bethink thee of that olden time, 

That happy, honored day, 
When, at St. James's holy shrine, 

Thy knighthood first was won ; 
When Ferdinand, my royal sire, 

Confessed thee for a son. 
He gave thee then thy knightly arms, 

My mother gave thy steed ; 
Thy spurs were buckled by these hands, 

That thou no grace might'st need. 
And had not chance forbid the vow, 

I thought with thee to wed ; 
But Count Lozano's daughter fair 

Thy happy bride was led. 
With her came wealth, an ample store, 

But power was mine, and state : 
Broad lands are good, and have their grace, 

But he that reigns is great. 
Thy wife is well ; thy match was wise ; 

Yet, Roderic ! at thy side 
A vassal's daughter sits by thee, 

And not a royal bride !" 

Our author has also given a pleasing version of the 

beautiful romance of " Fonte frida, fonte /rida" — 

11 Cooling fountain, cooling fountain," — which we are 

glad to see rendered faithfully, instead of following 

2B 53 



626 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

the example of Dr. Percy, in his version of the fine 
old ballad in a similar simple style, "Rio verde, rio 
verde" which we remember he translates by "Gentle 
river, gentle river," etc. Indeed, to do justice to 
Mr. Ticknor's translations we should have the text 
before us. Nowhere do we recall so close fidelity to 
the original, unless in Cary's Dante. Such fidelity 
does not always attain the object of conveying the 
best idea of the original. But in this humble poetry 
it is eminently successful. To give these rude gems a 
polish would be at once to change their character and 
defeat the great object of our author, — to introduce his 
readers to the peculiar culture of a primitive age. 

A considerable difficulty presents itself in finding a 
suitable measure for the English version of the ro??iances. 
In the original they are written in the eight-syllable 
line, with trochaic feet, instead of the iambics usually 
employed by us. But the real difficulty is in the pecu- 
liarity of the measure, — the asonante, as it is called, in 
which the rhyme depends solely on the conformity of 
vowel sounds, without reference to the consonants, as 
in English verse. Thus the words dedo, tiempo, viejos, 
are all good asonantes, taken at random from one of 
these old ballads. An attempt has been made by more 
than one clever writer to transplant them into English 
verse. But it has had as little success as the attempt 
to naturalize the ancient hexameter, which neither the 
skill of Southey nor of Longfellow will, probably, be 
able to effect. The Spanish vowels have for the most 
part a clear and open sound, which renders the melody 
of the versification sufficiently sensible to the ear; 
while the middle station which it occupies between 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 627 

the perfect rhyme and blank verse seems to fit it in 
an especial manner for these simple narrative compo- 
sitions. The same qualities have recommended it to 
the dramatic writers of Spain as the best medium of 
poetical dialogue, and as such it is habitually used by 
the great masters of the national theatre. 

No class of these popular compositions have greater 
interest than the Moorish romances, affording glimpses 
of a state of society in which the Oriental was strangely 
mingled with the European. Some of them may have 
been written by the Moriscoes after the fall of Granada. 
They are redolent of the beautiful land which gave 
them birth, — springing up like wild flowers amid the 
ruins of the fallen capital. Mr. Ticknor has touched 
lightly on these in comparison with some of the other 
varieties, perhaps because they have been more freely 
criticised by preceding writers. Every lover of good 
poetry is familiar with Mr. Lockhart's picturesque ver- 
sion of these ballads, which has every merit but that 
of fidelity to the original. 

The production of the Spanish ballads is evidence 
of great sensibility in the nation; but it must also be 
referred to the exciting scenes in which it was engaged. 
A similar cause gave rise to the beautiful border min- 
strelsy of Scotland. But the adventures of robber 
chieftains and roving outlaws excite an interest of a 
very inferior order to that created by the great contest 
for religion and independence which gave rise to the 
Spanish ballads. This gives an ennobling principle to 
these compositions which raises them far above the 
popular minstrelsy of every other country. It recom- 
mended them to the more polished writers of a later 



628 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

period, under whose bands, if they have lost some- 
thing of their primitive simplicity, they have been 
made to form a delightful portion of the national lit- 
erature. We cannot do better than to quote on this 
the eloquent remarks of our author : 

"Ballads, in the seventeenth century, had become 
the delight of the whole Spanish people. The soldier 
solaced himself with them in his tent, and the muleteer 
amid the sierras ; the maiden danced to them on the 
green, and the lover sang them for his serenade \ they 
entered into the low orgies of thieves and vagabonds, 
into the sumptuous entertainments of the luxurious 
nobility, and into the holiday services of the Church; 
the blind beggar chanted them to gather alms, and the 
puppet-showman gave them in recitative to explain his 
exhibition; they were a part of the very foundation of 
the theatre, both secular and religious, and the theatre 
carried them everywhere, and added everywhere to 
their effect and authority. No poetry of modern times 
has been so widely spread through all classes of society, 
and none has so entered into the national character. 
The ballads, in fact, seem to have been found on every 
spot of Spanish soil. They seem to have filled the 
very air that men breathed." 

The next of the great divisions of this long period 
is the Chronicles, — a fruitful theme, like the former, 
and still less explored. For much of this literature is 
in rare books, or rarer manuscripts. There is no lack 
of materials, however, in the present work, and the 
whole ground is mapped out before us by a guide 
evidently familiar with all its intricacies. 

The Spanish Chronicles are distributed into several 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 629 

classes, as those of a public and of a private nature, 
romantic chronicles, and those of travels. The work 
which may be said to lead the van of the long array is 
the "Crbnica General" of Alfonso the Wise, written 
by this monarch probably somewhere about the middle 
of the thirteenth century. It covers a wide ground, 
from the creation to the time of the royal writer. The 
third book is devoted to the Cid, ever the representa- 
tive of the heroic age of Castile. The fourth records 
the events of the monarch's own time. Alfonso's 
work is followed by the "Chronicle of the Cid," in 
which the events of the champion's life are now first 
detailed in sober prose. 

There is much resemblance between large portions 
of these two chronicles. This circumstance has led to 
the conclusion that they both must have been indebted 
to a common source, or, as seems more probable, that 
the "Chronicle of the Cid" was taken from that of 
Alfonso. This latter opinion Mr. Ticknor sustains by 
internal evidence not easily answered. There seems 
no reason to doubt, however, that both one and the 
other were indebted to the popular ballads, and that 
these, in their turn, were often little more than a ver- 
sification of the pages of Alfonso's Chronicle. Mr. 
Ticknor has traced out this curious process by bringing 
together the parallel passages, which are too numerous 
and nearly allied to leave any doubt on the matter. 

Sepulveda, a scholar of the sixteenth century, has 
converted considerable fragments of the "General 
Chronicle" into verse, without great violence to the 
original, — a remarkable proof of the near affinity that 
exists between prose and poetry in Spain; a fact which 

53* 



630 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

goes far to explain the facility and astonishing fecund- 
ity of some of its popular poets. For the Spaniards, 
it was nearly as easy to extemporize in verse as in 
prose. 

The example of Alfonso the Tenth was followed by 
his son, who appointed a chronicler to take charge of 
the events of his reign. This practice continued with 
later sovereigns, until the chronicle gradually rose to 
the pretensions of regular history; when historiogra- 
phers, with fixed salaries, were a} pointed by the crowns 
of Castile and Aragon; giving rise to a more complete 
body of contemporary annals, from authentic public 
sources, than is to be fou.xl in any other country in 
Christendom. 

Such a collection, beginning with the thirteenth 
century, is of high value, and would be of far higher 
were its writers gifted with any thing like a sound 
spirit of criticism. But superstition lay too closely at 
the bottom of the Castilian character to allow of this, 
— a superstition nourished by the strange circumstances 
of the nation, by the legends of the saints, by the mir- 
acles coined by the clergy in support of the good cause, 
by the very ballads of which we have been treating, 
which, mingling fact with fable, threw a halo around 
both that made it difficult to distinguish the one from 
the other. So palpable to a modern age are many 
of these fictions in regard to the Cid that one inge- 
nious critic doubts even the real existence of this per- 
sonage. But this is a degree of skepticism which, as 
Mr. Ticknor finely remarks, "makes too great a de- 
mand on our credulity." 

This superstition, too deeply seated to be eradicated, 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 631 

and so repugnant to a philosophical spirit of criticism, 
is the greatest blemish on the writings of the Castilian 
historians, even of the ripest age of scholarship, who 
show an appetite for the marvellous, and an easy faith, 
scarcely to be credited at the present day. But this is 
hardly a blemish with the older chronicles, and was 
suited to the twilight condition of the times. They 
are, indeed, a most interesting body of ancient litera- 
ture, with all the freshness and chivalrous bearing of 
the age ; with their long, rambling episodes, that lead 
to nothing; their childish fondness for pageants and 
knightly spectacles; their rough dialect, which, with 
the progress of time, working off the impurities of an 
unformed vocabulary, rose, in the reign of John the 
Second and of Ferdinand and Isabella, into passages 
of positive eloquence. But we cannot do better than 
give the concluding remarks of our author on this rich 
mine of literature, which he has now for the first time 
fully explored and turned up to the public gaze. 

"As we close it up," he says, — speaking of an old 
chronicle he has been criticising, — "we should not 
forget that the whole series, extending over full two 
hundred and fifty years, from the time of Alfonso the 
Wise to the accession of Charles the Fifth, and cover- 
ing the New World as well as the Old, is unrivalled in 
richness, in variety, and in picturesque and poetical 
elements. In truth, the chronicles of no other nation 
can, on such points, be compared to them ; not even 
the Portuguese, which approach the nearest in original 
and early materials ; nor the French, which, in Join- 
ville and Froissart, make the highest claims in another 
direction. For these old Spanish chronicles, whether 



632 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

they have their foundations in truth or in fable, always 
strike farther down than those of any other nation into 
the deep soil of the popular feeling and character. The 
old Spanish loyalty, the old Spanish religious faith, as 
both were formed and nourished in the long periods 
of national trial and suffering, are constantly coming 
out, — hardly less in Columbus and his followers, or 
even amid the atrocities of the conquests in the New 
World, than in the half-miraculous accounts of the 
battles of Hazinas and Tolosa, or in the grand and 
glorious drama of the fall of Granada. Indeed, wher- 
ever we go under their leading, whether to the court 
of Tamerlane or to that of Saint Ferdinand, we find 
the heroic elements of the national genius gathered 
around us ; and thus, in this vast, rich mass of chron- 
icles, containing such a body of antiquities, traditions, 
and fables as has been offered to no other people, we 
are constantly discovering not only the materials from 
which were drawn a multitude of the old Spanish bal- 
lads, plays, and romances, but a mine which has been 
unceasingly wrought by the rest of Europe for similar 
purposes and still remains unexhausted." 

We now come to the Romances of Chivalry, to 
which the transition is not difficult from the romantic 
chronicles we have been considering. It was, perhaps, 
the romantic character of these compositions, as well 
as of the popular minstrelsy of the country, which 
supplied the wants of the Spaniards in this way, and 
so long delayed the appearance of the true Romance 
of Chivalry. 

Long before it was seen in Spain, this kind of 
writing had made its appearance, in prose and verse, 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 633 

in other lands, and the tales of Arthur and the Round 
Table, and of Charlemagne and his Peers, had be- 
guiled the long evenings of our Norman ancestors, 
and of their brethren on the other side of the Chan- 
nel. The first book of chivalry that was published in 
Spain even then was not indigenous, but translated 
from a Portuguese work, the Amadis de Gaula. But 
the Portuguese, according to the account of Mr. Tick- 
nor, probably perished with the library of a nobleman, 
in the great earthquake at Lisbon, in 1755 ; so that 
Montalvan's Castilian translation, published in Queen 
Isabella's reign, now takes the place of the original. 
Of its merits as a translation who can speak? Its 
merits as a work of imagination, and, considering the 
age, its literary execution, are of a high order. 

An English version of the book appeared early in 
the present century, from the pen of Southey, to whom 
English literature is indebted for more than one val- 
uable contribution of a similar kind. We well re- 
member the delight with which, in our early days, we 
pored over its fascinating pages, — the bright scenes in 
which we revelled of Oriental mythology, the beautiful 
portraiture which is held up of knightly courtesy in 
the person of Amadis, and the feminine loveliness of 
Oriana. It was an ideal world of beauty and magnifi- 
cence, to which the Southern imagination had given a 
far warmer coloring than was to be found in the ruder 
conceptions of the Northern minstrel. At a later 
period, we have read — tried to read — the same story 
in the pages of Montalvan himself. But the age of 
chivalry was gone. 

The "Amadis" touched the right spring in the Cas- 

2B* 



634 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

tilian bosom, and its popularity was great and im- 
mediate. Edition succeeded edition ; and, what was 
worse, a swarm of other knight-errants soon came into 
the world, claiming kindred with the Amadis. But 
few of them bore any resemblance to their prototype, 
other than in their extravagance. Their merits were 
summarily settled by the worthy curate in " Don 
Quixote," who ordered most of them to the flames, 
declaring that the good qualities of Amadis should not 
cloak the sins of his posterity. 

The tendency of these books was very mischievous. 
They fostered the spirit of exaggeration, both in lan- 
guage and sentiment, too natural to the Castilian. 
They debauched the taste of the reader, while the 
voluptuous images in which most of them indulged 
did no good to his morals. They encouraged, in fine, 
a wild spirit of knight-errantry, which seemed to emu- 
late the extravagance of the tales themselves. Sober 
men wrote, preachers declaimed, against them, but in 
vain. The Cortes of 1553 presented a petition to the 
crown that the publication of such works might be 
prohibited, as pernicious to society. Another petition 
of the same body, in 1555, insists on this still more 
strongly, and in terms that, coming as they do from so 
grave an assembly, can hardly be read at the present 
day without a smile. Mr. Ticknor notices both these 
legislative acts, in an extract which we shall give. But 
he omits the words of the petition of 1555, which 
dwells so piteously on the grievances of the nation, 
and which we will quote, as they may amuse the reader. 
"Moreover," says the instrument, " we say that it is 
very notorious what mischief has been done to young 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



635 



men and maidens, and other persons, by the perusal 
of books full of lies and vanities, like Amadis, and 
works of that description, since young people espe- 
cially, from their natural idleness, resort to this kind 
of reading, and, becoming enamored of passages of 
love or arms, or other nonsense which they find set 
forth therein, when situations at all analogous offer, 
are led to act much more extravagantly than they 
otherwise would have done. And many times the 
daughter, when her mother has locked her up safely 
at home, amuses herself with reading these books, 
which do her more hurt than she would have received 
from going abroad. All which redounds not only to 
the dishonor of individuals, but to the great detriment 
of conscience, by diverting the affections from holy, 
true, and Christian doctrine, to those wicked vanities, 
with which the wits, as we have intimated, are com- 
pletely bewildered. To remedy this, we entreat your 
majesty that no book treating of such matters be hence- 
forth permitted to be read, that those now printed be 
collected and burned, and that none be published here- 
after without special license; by which measures your 
majesty will render great service to God, as well as to 
these kingdoms," etc., etc. 

But what neither the menaces of the pulpit nor the 
authority of the law could effect was brought about by 
the breath of ridicule, — 

" That soft and summer breath, whose subtile power 
Passes the strength of storms in their most desolate hour." 

The fever was at its height when Cervantes sent his 
knight-errant into the world to combat the phantoms 



6 3 6 



BIOGRAPHICAL AND 



of chivalry; and at one touch of his lance they dis- 
appeared forever. From the day of the publication 
of the "Don Quixote," not a book of chivalry was 
ever written in Spain. There is no other such triumph 
recorded in the annals of genius. 

We close these remarks with the following extract, 
which shows the condition of society in Castile under 
the influence of these romances : 

"Spain, when the romances of chivalry first ap- 
peared, had long been peculiarly the land of knight- 
hood. The Moorish wars, which had made every 
gentleman a soldier, necessarily tended to this result ; 
and so did the free spirit of the communities, led on 
as they were, during the next period, by barons who 
long continued almost as independent in their castles 
as the king was on his throne. Such a state of things, 
in fact, is to be recognized as far back as the thirteenth 
century, when the Partidas, by the most minute and 
painstaking legislation, provided for a condition of 
society not easily to be distinguished from that set 
forth in the Amadis or the Palmerin. The poem and 
history of the Cid bear witness yet earlier, indirectly 
indeed, but very strongly, to a similar state of the 
country; and so do many of the old ballads and other 
records of the national feelings and traditions that had 
come from the fourteenth century. 

"But in the fifteenth the chronicles are full of it, 
and exhibit it in forms the most grave and imposing. 
Dangerous tournaments, in some of which the chief 
men of the time, and even the kings themselves, took 
part, occur constantly, and are recorded among the 
important events of the age. At the passage of arms 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 637 

near Orbigo, in the reign of John the Second, eighty 
knights, as we have seen, were found ready to risk 
their lives for as fantastic a fiction of gallantry as is 
recorded in any of the romances of chivalry; a folly 
of which this was by no means the only instance. 
Nor did' they confine their extravagances to their own 
country. In the same reign, two Spanish knights went 
as far as Burgundy, professedly in search of adven- 
tures, which they strangely mingled with a pilgrimage 
to Jerusalem, — seeming to regard both as religious ex- 
ercises. And as late as the time of Ferdinand and 
Isabella, Fernando del Pulgar, their wise secretary, 
gives us the names of several distinguished noblemen, 
personally known to himself, who had gone into for- 
eign countries 'in order,' as he says, 'to try the for- 
tune of arms with any cavalier that might be pleased 
to adventure with them, and so gain honor for them- 
selves, and the fame of valiant and bold knights for 
the gentlemen of Castile.' 

"A state of society like this was the natural result 
of the extraordinary development which the institu- 
tions of chivalry had then received in Spain. Some 
of it was suited to the age, and salutary; the rest 
was knight-errantry, and knight-errantry in its wildest 
extravagance. When, however, the imaginations of 
men were so excited as to tolerate and maintain in 
their daily life such manners and institutions as these, 
they would not fail to enjoy the boldest and most free 
representations of a corresponding state of society in 
works of romantic fiction. But they went farther, 
Extravagant and even impossible as are many of the 
adventures recorded in the books of chivalry, they 

54 



6 $8 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

still seemed so little to exceed the absurdities fre- 
quently witnessed or told of known and living men, 
that many persons took the romances themselves to be 
true histories, and believed them. Thus, Mexia, the 
trustworthy historiographer of Charles the Fifth, says, 
in 1545, when speaking of 'the Amadises, Lisuartes, 
and Clarions,' that ' their authors do waste their time 
and weary their faculties in writing such books, which 
are read by all and believed by many. For,' he goes 
on, 'there be men who think all these things really 
happened, just as they read or hear them, though the 
greater part of the things themselves are sinful, pro- 
fane, and unbecoming.' And Castillo, another chron- 
icler, tells us gravely, in 1587, that Philip the Second, 
when he married Mary of England, only forty years 
earlier, promised that if King Arthur should return to 
claim the throne he would peaceably yield to that 
prince all his rights ; thus implying, at least in Cas- 
tillo himself, and probably in many of his readers, 
a full faith in the stories of Arthur and his Round 
Table. 

"Such credulity, it is true, now seems impossible, 
even if we suppose it was confined to a moderate 
number of intelligent persons; and hardly less so 
when, as in the admirable sketch of an easy faith in 
the stories of chivalry by the innkeeper and Mari- 
tornes in Don Quixote, we are shown that it extended 
to the mass of the people. But before we refuse our 
assent to the statements of such faithful chroniclers as 
Mexia, on the ground that what they relate is impos- 
sible, we should recollect that, in the age when they 
lived, men were in the habit of believing and asserting 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 639 

every day things no less incredible than those recited 
in the old romances. The Spanish Church then coun- 
tenanced a trust in miracles as of constant recurrence, 
which required of those who believed them more cre- 
dulity than the fictions of chivalry; and yet how few 
were found wanting in faith ! And how few doubted 
the tales that had come down to them of the impos- 
sible achievements of their fathers during the seven 
centuries of their warfare against the Moors, or the 
glorious traditions of all sorts that still constitute the 
charm of their brave old chronicles, though we now 
see at a glance that many of them are as fabulous as 
any thing told of Palmerin or Launcelot ! 

"But, whatever we may think of this belief in the 
romances of chivalry, there is no question that in 
Spain during the sixteenth century there prevailed 
a passion for them such as was never' known else- 
where. The proof of it comes to us from all sides. 
The poetry of the country is full of it, from the ro- 
mantic ballads that still live in the memory of the 
people, up to the old plays that have ceased to be 
acted and the old epics that have ceased to be read. 
The national manners and the national dress, more 
peculiar and picturesque than in other countries, long 
bore its sure impress. The old laws, too, speak no 
less plainly. Indeed, the passion for such fictions 
was so strong, and seemed so dangerous, that in 1553 
they were prohibited from being printed, sold, or read 
in the American colonies; and in 1555 the Cortes 
earnestly asked that the same prohibition might be 
extended to Spain itself, and that all the extant copies 
of romances of chivalry might be publicly burned. 



640 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

And, finally, half a century later, the happiest work 
of the greatest genius Spain has produced bears witness 
on every page to the prevalence of an absolute fanat- 
icism for books of chivalry, and becomes at once the 
seal of their vast popularity and the monument of their 
fate." 

We can barely touch on the Drama, the last of the 
three great divisions into which our author has thrown 
this period. It is of little moment, for down to the 
close of the fifteenth century the Castilian drama 
afforded small promise of the brilliant fortunes that 
awaited it. It was born under an Italian sky. Al- 
most its first lispings were at the vice-regal court of 
Naples, and under a foreign influence it displayed few 
of the national characteristics which afterwards marked 
its career. Yet the germs of future excellence may be 
discerned in the compositions of Encina and Naharro : 
and the "Celestina," though not designed for the 
stage, had a literary merit that was acknowledged 
throughout Europe. 

Mr. Ticknor, as usual, accompanies his analysis with 
occasional translations of the best passages from the 
ancient masters. From one of these — a sort of dra- 
matic eclogue, by Gil Vicente — we extract the follow- 
ing spirited verses. The scene represents Cassandra, 
the heroine of the piece, as refusing all the solicita- 
tions of her family to change her state of maiden free- 
dom for married life : 

" They say, ' 'Tis time, go, marry ! go !' 
But I'll no husband ! not I ! no ! 
For I would live all carelessly, 
Amid these hills, a maiden free, 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 641 

And never ask, nor anxious be, 

Of wedded weal or woe : 
Yet still they say, 'Go, marry! go!' 
But I'll no husband ! not I ! no ! 

" So, mother, think not I shall wed, 
And through a tiresome life be led, 
Or use in folly's ways instead 

What grace the heavens bestow. 
Yet still they say, ' Go, marry ! go !' 
But I'll no husband ! not I ! no ! 
The man has not been born, I ween, 
Who as my husband shall be seen ; 
And since what frequent tricks have been 

Undoubtingly I know, 
In vain they say, ' Go, marry ! go !' 
For I'll no husband ! not I ! no!" 

She escapes to the woods, and her kinsmen, after in 
vain striving to bring her back, come in dancing and 
singing as madly as herself: 

" She is wild ! she is wild ! 
Who shall speak to the child ? 

On the hills pass her hours, 
As a shepherdess free ; 

She is fair as the flowers, 
She is wild as the sea ! 
She is wild ! she is wild ! 
Who shall speak to the child?" 

Daring the course of the period we have been con- 
sidering there runs another rich vein of literature, the 
beautiful Provencal, — those lays of love and chivalry 
poured forth by the Troubadours in the little court of 
Provence, and afterwards of Catalonia. During the 
twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when the voice of the 
minstrel was hardly heard in other parts of Europe, 

54* 



642 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

the northern shores of the Mediterranean, on either 
side of the Pyrenees, were alive with song. But it was 
the melody of a too early spring, to be soon silenced 
under the wintry breath of persecution. 

Mr. Ticknor, who paid, while in Europe, much at- 
tention to the Romance dialects, has given a pleasing 
analysis of this early literature after it had fled from 
the storms of persecution to the south of Spain. But 
few will care to learn a language which locks up a lit- 
erature that was rather one of a beautiful promise than 
performance, — that prematurely perished and left no 
sign. And yet it did leave some sign of its existence, 
in the influence it exerted both on Italian and Cas- 
tilian poetry. 

This was peculiarly displayed at the court of John 
the Second of Castile, who flourished towards the 
middle of the fifteenth century. That prince gathered 
around him a circle of wits and poets, several of them 
men of the highest rank; and the intellectual spirit 
thus exhibited shows like a bright streak in the dawn 
of that higher civilization which rose upon Castile in 
the beginning of the following century. In this liter- 
ary circle King John himself was a prominent figure, 
correcting the verses of his loving subjects, and occa- 
sionally inditing some of his own. In the somewhat 
severe language of Mr. Ticknor, "he turned to letters 
to avoid the importunity of business, and to gratify 
a constitutional indolence." There was, it is true, 
something ridiculous in King John's most respectable 
tastes, reminding us of the character of his contem- 
porary, Rene of Anjou. But still it was something, 
in those rough times, to manifest a relish for intel- 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 643 

lectual pleasures ; and it had its effect in weaning his 
turbulent nobility from the indulgence of their coarser 
appetites. 

The same liberal tastes, with still better result, were 
shown by his daughter, the illustrious Isabella the 
Catholic. Not that any work of great pretensions for 
its poetical merits was then produced. The poetry of 
the age, indeed, was pretty generally infected with the 
meretricious conceits of the Provencal and the old 
Castilian verse. We must except from this reproach 
the "Coplas" of Jorge Manrique, which have found 
so worthy an interpreter in Mr. Longfellow, and which 
would do honor to any age. But the age of Isabella 
was in Castile what that of Poggio was in Italy. 
Learned men were invited from abroad, and took up 
their residence at the court. Native scholars went 
abroad, and brought back the rich fruits of an educa- 
tion in the most renowned of the Italian universities. 
The result of this scholarship was the preparation of 
dictionaries, grammars, and various philological works, 
which gave laws to the language and subjected it to a 
classic standard. Printing was introduced, and, under 
the royal patronage, presses were put in active opera- 
tion in various cities of the kingdom. Thus, although 
no great work was actually produced, a beneficent im- 
pulse was given to letters, which trained up the scholar 
and opened the way for the brilliant civilization of the 
reign of Charles the Fifth. Our author has not paid 
the tribute to the reign of Isabella to which, in our 
judgment, it is entitled even in a literary view. He 
has noticed with commendation the various efforts 
made in it to introduce a more liberal scholarship, but 



644 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

has by no means dwelt with the emphasis they deserve 
on the importance of the results. 

With the glorious rule of Ferdinand and Isabella 
closes the long period from the middle of the twelfth 
to the beginning of the sixteenth century, — a period 
which, if we except Italy, has no rival in modern his- 
tory for the richness, variety, and picturesque charac- 
ter of its literature. It is that portion of the literature 
which seems to come spontaneously like the vegetation 
of a virgin soil, that must lose something of its natural 
freshness and perfume when brought under a more 
elaborate cultivation. It is that portion which is most 
thoroughly imbued with the national spirit, unaffected 
by foreign influences ; and the student who would fully 
comprehend the genius of the Spaniards must turn to 
these pure and primitive sources of their literary cul- 
ture. 

We cannot do better than close with the remarks 
in which Mr. Ticknor briefly, but with his usual perspi- 
cuity, sums up the actual achievements of the period : 

"Poetry, or at least the love of poetry, made pro- 
gress with the great advancement of the nation under 
Ferdinand and Isabella ; though the taste of the court 
in whatever regarded Spanish literature continued low 
and false. Other circumstances, too, favored the great 
and beneficial change that was everywhere becoming 
apparent. The language of Castile had already as- 
serted its supremacy, and, with the old Castilian spirit 
and cultivation, it was spreading into Andalusia and 
Aragon, and planting itself amid the ruins of the 
Moorish power on the shores of the Mediterranean. 
Chronicle-writing was become frequent, and had begun 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 645 

to take the forms of regular history. The drama was 
advanced as far as the ' Celestina' in prose, and the 
more strictly scenic efforts of Torres Naharro in verse. 
Romance-writing was at the height of its success. And 
the old ballad spirit — the true foundation of Spanish 
poetry — had received a new impulse and richer mate- 
rials from the contests in which all Christian Spain 
had borne a part amid the mountains of Granada, and 
from the wild tales of the feuds and adventures of rival 
factions within the walls of that devoted city. Every 
thing, indeed, announced a decided movement in the 
literature of the nation, and almost every thing seemed 
to favor and facilitate it." 

The second great division embraces the long inter- 
val between 1500 and 1700, occupied by the Austrian 
dynasty of Spain. It covers the golden age, as gen- 
erally considered, of Castilian literature; that in which 
it submitted in some degree to the influences of the 
advancing European civilization, and which witnessed 
those great productions of genius that have had the 
widest reputation with foreigners, — the age of Cer- 
vantes, of Lope de Vega, and of Calderon. The con- 
dition of Spain itself was materially changed. Instead 
of being hemmed in by her mountain-barrier, she had 
extended her relations to every court in Europe, and 
established her empire in every quarter of the globe. 
Emerging from her retired and solitary condition, she 
now took the first rank among the states of Christen- 
dom. Her literature naturally took the impress of 
this change, but not to the extent — or, at least, not in 
the precise manner — it would have done if left to its 
natural and independent action. But, unhappily for 



646 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

the land, the great power of its monarchs was turned 
against their own people, and the people were assailed, 
moreover, through the very qualities which should have 
entitled them to forbearance from their masters. Prac- 
tising on their loyalty, their princes trampled on their 
ancient institutions, and loyalty was degraded into 
an abject servility. The religious zeal of early days, 
which had carried them triumphant through the Moor- 
ish struggle, turned, under the influence of the priests, 
into a sour fanaticism, which opened the way to the 
Inquisition, — the most terrible engine of oppression 
ever devised by man, — not so terrible for its operation 
on the body as on the mind. Under its baneful influ- 
ence, literature lost its free and healthy action; and, 
however high its pretensions as a work of art, it be- 
comes so degenerate in a moral aspect that it has far 
less to awaken our sympathies than the productions of 
an earlier time. From this circumstance, as well as 
from that of its being much better known to the gen- 
erality of scholars, we shall pass only in rapid review 
some of its most remarkable persons and productions. 
Before entering on this field, we will quote some im- 
portant observations of our author on the general pros- 
pects of the period he is to discuss. Thus to allow 
coming events to cast their shadows before, is better 
suited to the purposes of the literary historian than 
of the novelist. His remarks on the Inquisition are 
striking: 

"The results of such extraordinary traits in the 
national character could not fail to be impressed upon 
the literature of any country, and particularly upon a 
literature which, like that of Spain, had always been 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 647 

strongly marked by the popular temperament and pe- 
culiarities. But the period was not one in which such 
traits could be produced with poetical effect. The 
ancient loyalty, which had once been so generous an 
element in the Spanish character and cultivation, was 
now infected with the ambition of universal empire, 
and was lavished upon princes and nobles who, like 
the later Philips and their ministers, were unworthy of 
its homage; so that in the Spanish historians and epic 
poets of this period, and even in more popular writers, 
like Quevedo and Calderon, we find a vainglorious 
admiration of their country, and a poor flattery of 
royalty and rank, that reminds us of the old Castilian 
pride and deference only by showing how both had 
lost their dignity. And so it is with the ancient re- 
ligious feeling that was so nearly akin to this loyalty. 
The Christian spirit, which gave an air of duty to the 
wildest forms of adventure throughout the country 
during its long contest with the power of misbelief, 
was now fallen away into a low and anxious bigotry, 
fierce and intolerant towards every thing that differed 
from its own sharply-defined faith, and yet so per- 
vading and so popular that the romances and tales of 
the time are full of it, and the national theatre, in 
more than one form, becomes its strange and grotesque 
monument. 

" Of course, the body of Spanish poetry and eloquent 
prose produced during this interval — the earlier part 
of which was the period of the greatest glory Spain 
ever enjoyed — was injuriously affected by so diseased a 
condition of the national character. That generous 
and manly spirit which is the breath of intellectual 



648 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

life to any people was restrained and stifled. Some de- 
partments of literature, such as forensic eloquence and 
eloquence of the pulpit, satirical poetry, and elegant 
didactic prose, hardly appeared at all ; others, like 
epic poetry, were strangely perverted and misdirected; 
while yet others, like the drama, the ballads, and the 
lighter forms of lyrical verse, seemed to grow exuberant 
and lawless, from the very restraints imposed on the 
rest, — restraints which, in fact, forced poetical genius 
into channels where it would otherwise have flowed 
much more scantily and with much less luxuriant 
results. 

"The books that were published during the whole 
period on which we are now entering, and indeed for 
a century later, bore everywhere marks of the subjec- 
tion to which the press and those who wrote for it were 
alike reduced. From the abject title-pages and dedi- 
cations of the authors themselves, through the crowd 
of certificates collected from their friends to establish 
the orthodoxy of works that were often as little con- 
nected with religion as fairy-tales, down to the colo- 
phon, supplicating pardon for any unconscious neglect 
of the authority of the Church or any too free use of 
classical mythology, we are continually oppressed with 
painful proofs not only how completely the human 
mind was enslaved in Spain, but how grievously it had 
become cramped and crippled by the chains it had so 
long worn. 

"But we shall be greatly in error if, as we notice 
these deep marks and strange peculiarities in Spanish 
literature, we suppose they were produced by the direct 
action either of the Inquisition or of the civil govern- 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 649 

merit of the country, compressing, as if with a phys- 
ical power, the whole circle of society. This would 
have been impossible. No nation would" have submit- 
ted to it ; much less so high-spirited and chivalrous a 
nation as the Spanish in the reign of Charles the Fifth 
and in the greater part of that of Philip the Second. 
This dark work was done earlier. Its foundations were 
laid deep and sure in the old Castilian character. It 
was the result of the excess and misdirection of that 
very Christian zeal which fought so fervently and glo- 
riously against the intrusion of Mohammedanism into 
Europe, and of that military loyalty which sustained 
the Spanish princes so faithfully through the whole of 
that terrible contest ; both of them high and enno- 
bling principles, which in Spain were more wrought 
into the popular character than they ever were in any 
other country. 

cl Spanish submission to an unworthy despotism, and 
Spanish bigotry, were, therefore, not the results of the 
Inquisition and the modern appliances of a corrupting 
monarchy, but the Inquisition and the despotism were 
rather the results of a misdirection of the old religious 
faith and loyalty. The civilization that recognized 
such elements presented, no doubt, much that was 
brilliant, picturesque, and ennobling; but it was not 
without its darker side; for it failed to excite and 
cherish many of the most elevating qualities of our 
common nature, — those qualities which are produced 
in domestic life and result in the cultivation of the 
arts of peace. 

" As we proceed, therefore, we shall find, in the full 
development of the Spanish character and literature, 
2 c 55 



650 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

seeming contradictions, which can be reconciled only 
by looking back to the foundations on which they 
both rest. We shall find the Inquisition at the height 
of its power, and a free and immoral drama at the 
height of its popularity, — Philip the Second and his 
two immediate successors governing the country with 
the severest and most jealous despotism, while Que- 
vedo was writing his witty and dangerous satires, and 
Cervantes his genial and wise Don Quixote. But the 
more carefully we consider such a state of things, 
the more we shall see that these are moral contradic- 
tions which draw after them grave moral mischiefs. 
The Spanish nation and the men of genius who illus- 
trated its best days might be light-hearted because 
they did not perceive the limits within which they 
were confined, or did not, for a time, feel the restraints 
that were imposed upon them. What they gave up 
might be given up with cheerful hearts, and not with a 
sense of discouragement and degradation ; it might 
be done in the spirit of loyalty and with the fervor 
of religious zeal ; but it is not at all the less true that 
the hard limits were there, and that great sacrifices 
of the best elements of the national character must 
follow. 

"Of this, time gave abundant proof. Only a little 
more than a century elapsed before the government 
that had threatened the world with a universal empire 
was hardly able to repel invasion from abroad, or 
maintain the allegiance of its own subjects at home. 
Life — the vigorous, poetical life which had been 
kindled through the country in its ages of trial and 
adversity — was evidently passing out of the whole 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 651 

Spanish character. As a people they sunk away from 
being a first-rate power in Europe, till they became 
one of altogether inferior importance and considera- 
tion, and then, drawing back haughtily behind their 
mountains, rejected all equal intercourse with the rest 
of the world, in a spirit almost as exclusive and intol- 
erant as that in which they had formerly refused in- 
tercourse with their Arab conquerors. The crude and 
gross wealth poured in from their American posses- 
sions sustained, indeed, for yet another century the 
forms of a miserable political existence in their gov- 
ernment; but the earnest faith, the loyalty, the dignity 
of the Spanish people were gone, and little remained 
in their place but a weak subserviency to the un- 
worthy masters of the state, and a low, timid bigotry 
in whatever related to religion. The old enthusiasm, 
rarely directed by wisdom from the first, and often 
misdirected afterwards, faded away; and the poetry of 
the country, which had always depended more on the 
state of the popular feeling than any other poetry of 
modern times, faded and failed with it." 

The first thing that strikes us, at the very commence- 
ment of this new period, is the attempt to subject the 
Castilian to Italian forms of versification. This at- 
tempt, through the perfect tact of Boscan and the 
delicate genius of Garcilasso, who rivalled in their 
own walks the greatest masters of Italian verse, was 
eminently successful. It would indeed be wonderful 
if the intimate relations now established between 
Spain and Italy did not lead to a reciprocal influence 
of their literatures on each other. The two languages, 
descended from the same parent stock, the Latin, were 



652 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

nearest of kin to each other, — in the relation, if we 
may so speak, of brother and sister. The Castilian, 
with its deep Arabic gutturals, and its clear, sonorous 
sounds, had the masculine character, which assorted 
well with the more feminine graces of the Italian, with 
its musical cadences and soft vowel terminations. The 
transition from one language to the other was almost 
as natural as from the dialect of one province of a 
countrv to that of its neighbor. 

The revolution thus effected went far below the sur- 
face of Spanish poetry. It is for this reason that we 
are satisfied that Mr. Ticknor has judged wisely, as we 
have before intimated, in arranging the division-lines 
of his two periods in such a manner as to throw into 
the former that primitive portion of the national lit- 
erature which was untouched, at least to any consider- 
able extent, by a foreign influence. 

Yet in the compositions of this second period it 
must be admitted that by far the greater portion of 
what is really good rests on the original basis of the 
national character, though under the controlling influ- 
ences of a riper age of civilization. And foremost of 
the great writers of this national school we find the 
author of "Don Quixote," whose fame seems now to 
belong to Europe as much as to the land that gave 
him birth. Mr. Ticknor has given a very interesting 
notice of the great writer and of his various composi- 
tions. The materials for this are, for the most part, 
not very difficult to be procured ; for Cervantes is the 
author whom his countrymen, since his death, with a 
spirit very different from that of his contemporaries, 
have most delighted to honor. Fortunately, the Cas- 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 653 

tilian romancer has supplied us with materials for his 
own biography, which remind us of the lamentable 
poverty under which we labor in all that relates to 
his contemporary, Shakspeare. In Mr. Ticknor's bio- 
graphical notice the reader will find some details 
probably not familiar to him, and a careful discussion 
of those points over which still rests any cloud of un- 
certainty. 

He inquires into the grounds of the imputation of 
an unworthy jealousy having existed between Lope and 
his illustrious rival, and we heartily concur with him in 
the general results of his investigation : 

"Concerning his relations with Lope de Vega there 
has been much discussion to little purpose. Certain it 
is that Cervantes often praises this great literary idol 
of his age, and that four or five times Lope stoops 
from his pride of place and compliments Cervantes, 
though never beyond the measure of praise he bestows 
on many whose claims were greatly inferior. But in 
his stately flight it is plain that he soared much above 
the author of Don Quixote, to whose highest merits 
he seemed carefully to avoid all homage ; and though 
I find no sufficient reason to suppose their relation to 
each other was marked by any personal jealousy or ill 
will, as has been sometimes supposed, yet I can find 
no proof that it was either intimate or kindly. On the 
contrary, when we consider the good nature of Cer- 
vantes, which made him praise to excess nearly all his 
other literary contemporaries, as well as the greatest 
of them all, and when we allow for the frequency of 
hyperbole in such praises at that time, which prevented 
them from being what they would now be, we may 

55* 



654 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

perceive an occasional coolness in his manner, when 
he speaks of Lope, which shows that, without over- 
rating his own merits and claims, he was not insensible 
to the difference in their respective positions, or to the 
injustice towards himself implied by it. Indeed, his 
whole tone, whenever he notices Lope, seems to be 
marked with much personal dignity, and to be singu- 
larly honorable to him." 

Mr. Ticknor, in a note to the above, states that he 
has been able to find only five passages in all Lope de 
Vega's works where there is any mention of Cervantes, 
and not one of these written after the appearance of 
the "Don Quixote," during its author's lifetime, — a 
significant fact. One of the passages to which our 
author refers, and which is from the " Laurel de 
Apolo," contains, he says, "a somewhat stiff eulogy 
on Cervantes." We quote the original couplet, which 
alludes to the injury inflicted on Cervantes' s hand in 
the great battle of Lepanto : 

" Porque se diga que una mano herida 
Pudo dar a su dueno eterna vida." 

Which may be rendered, 

" The hand, though crippled in the glorious strife, 
Sufficed to gain its lord eternal life." 

We imagine that most who read the distich — the Cas- 
tilian, not the English — will be disposed to regard it 
as no inelegant, and certainly not a parsimonious, 
tribute from one bard to another, — at least, if made 
in the lifetime of the subject of it. Unfortunately, it 
was not written till some fourteen years after the death 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 



655 



of Cervantes, when he was beyond the power of being 
pleased or profited by praise from any quarter. 

Mr. Ticknor closes the sketch of Cervantes with 
some pertinent and touching reflections on the circum- 
stances under which his great work was composed : 

''The romance which he threw so carelessly from 
him, and which, I am persuaded, he regarded rather 
as a bold effort to break up the absurd taste of his time 
for the fancies of chivalry than as any thing of more 
serious import, has been established by an uninter- 
rupted, and, it may be said, an unquestioned, success 
ever since, both as the oldest classical specimen of 
romantic fiction, and as one of the most remarkable 
monuments of modern genius. But, though this may 
be enough to fill the measure of human fame and glory, 
it is not all to which Cervantes is entitled ; for, if we 
would do him the justice that would have been dearest 
to his own spirit, and even if we would ourselves fully 
comprehend and enjoy the whole of his Don Quixote, 
we should, as we read it, bear in mind that this delight- 
ful romance was not the result of a youthful exuberance 
of feeling and a happy external condition, nor com- 
posed in his best years, when the spirits of its author 
were light and his hopes high ; but that — with all its 
unquenchable and irresistible humor, with its bright 
views of the world, and its cheerful trust in goodness 
and virtue — it was written in his old age, at the con- 
clusion of a life nearly every step of which had been 
marked with disappointed expectations, disheartening 
struggles, and sore calamities ; that he began it in a 
prison, and that it was finished when he felt the hand 
of death pressing heavy and cold upon his heart. If 



656 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

this be remembered as we read, we may feel, as we 
ought to feel, what admiration and reverence are due 
not only to the living power of Don Quixote, but to 
the character and genius of Cervantes." 

The next name that meets us in the volume is that 
of Lope de Vega Carpio, the idol of his generation, 
who lived, in all the enjoyment of wealth and worldly 
honors, in the same city, and, as some accounts state, 
in the same street, where his illustrious rival was pining 
in poverty and neglect. If posterity has reversed the 
judgment of their contemporaries, still we cannot with- 
hold our admiration at the inexhaustible invention of 
Lope and the miraculous facility of his composition. 
His achievements in this way, perfectly well authenti- 
cated, are yet such as to stagger credibility. He wrote 
in all about eighteen hundred regular dramas, and four 
hundred autos, — pieces of one act each. Besides this, 
he composed, at leisure intervals, no less than twenty- 
one printed volumes of miscellaneous poetry, including 
eleven narrative and didactic poems of much length, 
in ottava rima, and seven hundred sonnets, also in 
the Italian measure. His comedies, amounting to be- 
tween two and three thousand lines each, were mostly 
rhymed, and interspersed with ballads, sonnets, and 
different kinds of versification. Critics have some- 
times amused themselves with computing the amount 
of matter thus actually thrown off by him in the course 
of his dramatic career. The sum swells to twenty-one 
million three hundred thousand verses ! He lived to 
the age of seventy-two, and if we allow him to have 
employed fifty years — which will not be far from the 
truth — in his theatrical compositions, it will give an 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 657 

average of something like a play a week, through the 
whole period, to say nothing of the epics and other 
miscellanies ! He tells us, farther, that on one occa- 
sion he produced five entire plays in a fortnight. And 
his biographer assures us that more than once he turned 
off a whole drama in twenty-four hours. These plays, 
it will be recollected, with their stores of invention and 
fluent versification, were the delight of all classes of 
his countrymen, and the copious fountain of supply to 
half the theatres of Europe. Well might Cervantes 
call him the " monstrito de naturaleza" — the "miracle 
of nature." 

The vast popularity of Lope, and the unprece- 
dented amount of his labors, brought with them, as 
might be expected, a substantial recompense. This 
remuneration was of the most honorable kind, for it 
was chiefly derived from the public. It is said to have 
amounted to no less than a hundred thousand ducats, 
— which, estimating the ducat at its probable value of 
six or seven dollars of our day, has no parallel — or 
perhaps not more than one — upon record. 

Yet Lope did not refuse the patronage of the great. 
From the Duke of Sessa he is said to have received, 
in the course of his life, more than twenty thousand 
ducats. Another of his noble patrons was the Duke 
of Alva; not the terrible Duke of the Netherlands, 
but his grandson, — a man of some literary pretensions, 
hardly claimed for his great ancestor. Yet with the 
latter he has been constantly confounded, by Lord 
Holland, in his life of the poet, by Southey, after an 
examination of the matter, and lastly, though with 
some distrust, by Nicholas Antonio, the learned Cas- 
2 c* 



658 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

tilian biographer. Mr. Ticknor shows beyond a doubt, 
from a critical examination of the subject, that they 
are all in error. The inquiry and the result are clearly 
stated in the notes, and are one among the many 
evidences which these notes afford of the minute and 
very accurate researches of our author into matters of 
historical interest that have baffled even the Castilian 
scholars. 

We remember meeting with something of a similar 
blunder in Schlegel's Dramatic Lectures, where he 
speaks of the poet Garcilasso de la Vega as descended 
from the Peruvian Incas, and as having lost his life 
before Tunis. The fact is that the poet died at Nice, 
and that, too, some years before the birth of the Inca 
Garcilasso, with whom Schlegel so strangely confounds 
him. One should be charitable to such errors, — 
though a dogmatic critic like Schlegel has as little 
right as any to demand such charity, — for we well 
know how difficult it is always to escape them, when, 
as in Castile, the same name seems to descend, as an 
heir-loom, from one generation to another, if it be 
not, indeed, shared by more than one of the same 
generation. In the case of the Duke of Alva there 
was not even this apology. 

Mr. Ticknor has traced the personal history of Lope 
de Vega, so as to form a running commentary on his 
literary. It will be read with satisfaction even by those 
who are familiar with Lord Holland's agreeable life of 
the poet, since the publication of which more ample 
researches have been made into the condition of the 
Castilian drama. Those who are disposed to set too 
high a value on the advantages of literary success may 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 659 

learn a lesson by seeing how ineffectual it was to secure 
the happiness of that spoiled child of fortune. We 
give our author's account of his latter days, when his 
mind had become infected with the religious gloom 
which has too often settled round the evening of life 
with the fanatical Spaniard : 

"But, as his life drew to a close, his religious feel- 
ings, mingled with a melancholy fanaticism, predom- 
inated more and more. Much of his poetry composed 
at this time expressed them ; and at last they rose to 
such a height that he was almost constantly in a state 
of excited melancholy, or, as it was then beginning to 
be called, of hypochondria. Early in the month of 
August he felt himself extremely weak, and suffered 
more than ever from that sense of discouragement 
which was breaking down his resources and strength. 
His thoughts, however, were so exclusively occupied 
with his spiritual condition that, even when thus re- 
duced, he continued to fast, and on one occasion went 
through with a private discipline so cruel that the walls 
of the apartment where it occurred were afterwards 
found sprinkled with his blood. From this he never 
recovered. He was taken ill the same night ; and, 
after fulfilling the offices prescribed by his Church with 
the most submissive devotion, — mourning that he had 
ever been engaged in any occupations but such as were 
exclusively religious, — he died on the 25th of August, 
1635, nearly seventy-three years old. 

"The sensation produced by his death was such as 
is rarely witnessed even in the case of those upon 
whom depends the welfare of nations. The Duke of 
Sessa, who was his especial patron, and to whom he 



660 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

left his manuscripts, provided for the funeral in a man- 
ner becoming his own wealth and rank. It lasted nine 
days. The crowds that thronged to it were immense. 
Three bishops officiated, and the first nobles of the 
land attended as mourners. Eulogies and poems fol- 
lowed on all sides, and in numbers all but incredible. 
Those written in Spain make one considerable volume, 
and end with a drama in which his apotheosis was 
brought upon the public stage. Those written in Italy 
are hardly less numerous, and fill another. But more 
touching than any of them was the prayer of that 
much-loved daughter, who had been shut up from .the 
world fourteen years, that the long funeral procession 
might pass by her convent and permit her once more to 
look on the face she so tenderly venerated ; and more 
solemn than any was the mourning of the multitude, 
from whose dense mass audible sobs burst forth as his 
remains slowly descended from their sight into the 
house appointed for all living." 

Mr. Ticknor follows up his biographical sketch of 
Lope with an analysis of his plays, concluding the 
whole with a masterly review of his qualities as a dra- 
matic writer. The discussion has a wider import than 
at first appears. For Lope de Vega, although he built 
on the foundations of the ancient drama, yet did this 
in such a manner as to settle the forms of this depart- 
ment of literature forever for his countrymen. 

It would be interesting to compare the great Spanish 
dramatist with Shakspeare, who flourished at the same 
period, and who, in like manner, stamped his own 
character on the national theatre. Both drew their 
fictions from every source indiscriminately, and neither 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 66 1 

paid regard to probabilities of chronology, geography, 
or scarcely history. Time, place, and circumstance 
were of little moment in their eyes. Both built their 
dramas on the romantic model, with its magic scenes 
of joy and sorrow, in the display of which each was 
master in his own way; though the English poet could 
raise the tone of sentiment to a moral grandeur which 
the Castilian, with all the tragic coloring of his pencil, 
could never reach. Both fascinated their audiences by 
that sweet and natural flow of language, that seemed 
to set itself to music as it was uttered. But, however 
much alike in other points, there was one distinguish- 
ing feature in each, which removed them and their 
dramas far as the poles asunder. 

Shakspeare's great object was the exhibition of char- 
acter. To this every thing was directed. Situation, 
dialogue, story, — all were employed only to this great 
end. This was in perfect accordance with the taste 
of his nation, as shown through the whole of its lit- 
erature, from Chaucer to Scott. Lope de Vega, on 
the other hand, made so little account of character 
that he reproduces the same leading personages, in his 
different plays, over and over again, as if they had 
been all cast in the same mould. The galan, the damn, 
the gracioso, or buffoon, recur as regularly as the clown 
in the old English comedy, and their role is even more 
precisely defined. 

The paramount object with Lope was the intrigue, — 
the story. His plays were, what Mr. Ticknor well 
styles them, dramatic novels. And this, as our au- 
thor remarks, was perfectly conformable to the preva- 
lent spirit of Spanish literature, — clearly narrative, — 

56 



662 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

as shown in its long epics of the twelfth and thirteenth 
centuries, its host of ballads, its gossiping chronicles, 
its chivalrous romances. The great purpose of Lope 
was to excite and maintain an interest in the story. 
"Keep the denouement in suspense," he says: "if it 
be once surmised, your audience will turn their backs 
on you." He frequently complicates his intrigues in 
such a manner that only the closest attention can follow 
them. He cautions his hearers to give this attention, 
especially at the outset. 

Lope, with great tact, accommodated his theatre to 
the prevailing taste of his countrymen. "Plautus and 
Terence," he says, "I throw into the fire when I begin 
to write;" thus showing that it was not by accident 
but on a settled principle that he arranged the forms 
of his dramas. It is the favorite principle of modern 
economists, that of consulting the greatest happiness 
of the greatest number. Lope did so, and was re- 
warded for it not merely by the applause of the mil- 
lion, but by that of every Spaniard, high and low, in 
the country. In all this, Lope de Vega acted on 
strictly philosophical principles. He conformed to 
the romantic, although the distinction was not then 
properly understood ; and he thought it necessary to 
defend his departure from the rules of the ancients. 
But, in truth, such rules were not suited to the genius 
and usages of the Spaniards, any more than of the 
English ; and more than one experiment proved that 
they would be as little tolerated by the one people as 
the other. 

It is remarkable that the Spaniards, whose language 
rests so broadly on the Latin, in the same manner as 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 663 

with the French and the Italians, should have refused 
to rest their literature, like them, on the classic models 
of antiquity, and have chosen to conform to the ro- 
mantic spirit of the more northern nations of the Teu- 
tonic family. It was the paramount influence of the 
Gothic element in their character, co-operating with 
the peculiar and most stimulating influences of their 
early history. 

We close our remarks on Lope de Vega with some 
excellent reflections of our author on the rapidity of 
his composition, and showing to what extent his genius 
was reverenced by his contemporaries : 

•'Lope de Vega's immediate success, as we have 
seen, was in proportion to his rare powers and favor- 
able opportunities. For a long time nobody else was 
willingly heard on the stage; and during the whole 
of the forty or fifty years that he wrote for it, he 
stood quite unapproached in general popularity. His 
unnumbered plays and farces, in all the forms that 
were demanded by the fashions of the age or per- 
mitted by religious authority, filled the theatres both 
of the capital and the provinces; and so extraordinary 
was the impulse he gave to dramatic representations 
that, though there were only two companies of stroll- 
ing players at Madrid when he began, there were about 
the period of his death no less than forty, comprehend- 
ing nearly a thousand persons. 

"Abroad, too, his fame was hardly less remarkable. 
In Rome, Naples, and Milan his dramas were per- 
formed in their original language ; in France and Italy 
his name was announced in order to fill the theatres 
when no play of his was to be performed; and once 



664 BIOGRAPHICAL AND .. 

even, and probably oftener, one of his dramas was 
represented in the seraglio at Constantinople. But 
perhaps neither all this popularity, nor yet the crowds 
that followed him in the streets and gathered in the 
balconies to watch him as he passed along, nor the 
name of Lope, that was given to whatever was es- 
teemed singularly good in its kind, is so striking a 
proof of his dramatic success as the fact, so often 
complained of by himself and his friends, that multi- 
tudes of his plays were fraudulently noted down as 
they were acted, and then printed for profit through- 
out Spain, and that multitudes of other plays appeared 
under his name, and were represented all over the 
provinces, that he had never heard of till they were 
published and performed. 

"A large income naturally followed such popularity, 
for his plays were liberally paid for by the actors; and 
he had patrons of a munificence unknown in our days, 
and always undesirable. But he was thriftless and 
wasteful, exceedingly charitable, and, in hospitality to 
his friends, prodigal. He was, therefore, almost al- 
ways embarrassed. At the end of his • Jerusalem,' 
printed as early as 1609, he complains of the pressure 
of his domestic affairs; and in his old age he ad- 
dressed some verses, in the nature of a petition, to the 
still more thriftless Philip the Fourth, asking the means 
of living for himself and daughter. After his death, 
his poverty was fully admitted by his executor; and 
yet, considering the relative value of money, no poet, 
perhaps, ever received so large a compensation for his 
works. 

" It should, however, be remembered that no other 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 665 

poet ever wrote so much with popular effect. For, if 
we begin with his dramatic compositions, which are 
the best of his efforts, and go down to his epics, 
which, on the whole, are the worst, we shall find the 
amount of what was received with favor, as it came 
from the press, quite unparalleled. And when to this 
we are compelled to add his own assurance, just before 
his death, that the greater part of his works still re- 
mained in manuscript, we pause in astonishment, and, 
before we are able to believe the account, demand 
some explanation that will make it credible, — an ex- 
planation which is the more important because it is 
the key to much of his personal character, as well as 
of his poetical success. And it is this. No poet of 
any considerable reputation ever had a genius so nearly 
related to that of an improvisator, or ever indulged his 
genius so freely in the spirit of improvisation. This 
talent has always existed in the southern countries of 
Europe, and in Spain has, from the first, produced, 
in different ways, the most extraordinary results. We 
owe to it the invention and perfection of the old bal- 
lads, which were originally improvisated and then pre- 
served by tradition ; and we owe to it the seguidillas, 
the boleros, and all the other forms of popular poetry 
that still exist in Spain, and are daily poured forth by 
the fervent imaginations of the uncultivated classes of 
the people, and sung to the national music, that some- 
times seems to fill the air by night as the light of the 
sun does by day. 

"In the time of Lope de Vega the passion for such 
improvisation had risen higher than it ever rose be- 
fore, if it had not spread out more widely. Actors 

56* 



666 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

were expected sometimes to improvisate on themes 
given to them by the audience. Extemporaneous dra- 
mas, with all the varieties of verse demanded by a 
taste formed in the theatres, were not of rare occur- 
rence. Philip the Fourth, Lope's patron, had such 
performed in his presence, and bore a part in them 
himself. And the famous Count de Lemos, the vice- 
roy of Naples, to whom Cervantes was indebted for so 
much kindness, kept, as an apanage to his viceroyalty, 
a poetical court, of which the two Argensolas were the 
chief ornaments, and in which extemporaneous plays 
were acted with brilliant success. 

"Lope de Vega's talent was undoubtedly of near 
kindred to this genius of improvisation, and produced 
its extraordinary results by a similar process and in 
the same spirit. He dictated verse, we are told, with 
ease, more rapidly than an amanuensis could take it 
down ; and wrote out an entire play in two days which 
could with difficulty be transcribed by a copyist in the 
same time. He was not absolutely an improvisator, 
for his education and position naturally led him to 
devote himself to written composition ; but he was 
continually on the borders of whatever belongs to 
an improvisator's peculiar province, — was continually 
showing, in his merits and defects, in his ease, grace, 
and sudden resource, in his wildness and extravagance, 
in the happiness of his versification and the prodigal 
abundance of his imagery, that a very little more free- 
dom, a very little more indulgence given to his feel- 
ings and his fancy, would have made him at once and 
entirely, not only an improvisator, but the most re- 
markable one that ever lived." 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 667 

We pass over the long array of dramatic writers 
who trod closely in the footsteps of their great master, 
as well as a lively notice of the satirist Quevedo, and 
come at once to Calderon de la Barca, the great poet 
who divided with Lope the empire of the Spanish 
stage. 

Our author has given a full biography of this famous 
dramatist, to which we must refer the reader ; and we 
know of no other history in English where he can 
meet with it at all. Calderon lived in the reign of 
Philip the Fourth, which, extending from 1621 to 
1665, comprehends the most flourishing period of the 
Castilian theatre. The elegant tastes of the monarch, 
with his gay and gracious manners, formed a contrast 
to the austere temper of the other princes of the house 
of Austria. He was not only the patron of the drama, 
but a professor of the dramatic art, and, indeed, a 
performer. He wrote plays himself, and acted them 
in his own palace. His nobles, following his example, 
turned their saloons into theatres; and the great towns, 
and many of the smaller ones, partaking of the enthu- 
siasm of the court, had their own theatres and com- 
panies of actors, which altogether amounted, at one 
time, to no less than three hundred. One may under- 
stand that it required no small amount of material to 
keep such a vast machinery in motion. 

At the head of this mighty apparatus was the poet 
Calderon, the favorite of the court even more than 
Lope de Vega, but not more than he the favorite of 
the nation. He was fully entitled to this high distinc- 
tion, if we are to receive half that is said of him by 
the German critics, among whom Schlegel particularly 



668 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

celebrates him as displaying the purest model of the 
romantic ideal, the most perfect development of the 
sentiments of love, heroism, and religious devotion. 
This exaggerated tone of eulogy calls forth the rebuke 
of Sismondi, who was educated in a different school of 
criticism, and whose historical pursuits led him to look 
below the surface of things to their moral tendencies. 
By this standard Calderon has failed. And yet it seems 
to be a just standard, even when criticising a work by 
the rules of art ; for a disregard of the obvious laws 
of morality is a violation of the principles of taste, on 
which the beautiful must rest. Not that Calderon's 
plays are chargeable with licentiousness or indecency 
to a greater extent than was common in the writers of 
the period. But they show a lamentable confusion of 
ideas in regard to the first principles of morality, by 
entirely confounding the creed of the individual with 
his religion. A conformity to the established creed is 
virtue, the departure from it vice. It is impossible to 
conceive, without reading his performances, to what 
revolting consequences this confusion of the moral 
perceptions perpetually leads. 

Yet Calderon should not incur the reproach of hy- 
pocrisy, but that of. fanaticism. He was the very dupe 
of. superstition ; and the spirit of fanaticism he shares 
with the greater part of his countrymen — even the 
most enlightened — of that period. Hypocrisy may 
have been the sin of the Puritan, but fanaticism was 
the sin of the Catholic Spaniard of the sixteenth and 
seventeenth centuries. The one quality may be thought 
to reflect more discredit on the heart, the other on 
the head. The philosopher may speculate on their 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 669 

comparative moral turpitude ; but the pages of history- 
show that fanaticism armed with power has been the 
most fruitful parent of misery to mankind. 

Calderon's drama turns on the most exaggerated 
principles of honor, jealousy, and revenge, mingled 
with the highest religious exaltation. Some of these 
sentiments, usually referred to the influence of the 
Arabs, Mr. Ticknor traces to the ancient Gothic laws, 
which formed the basis of the early Spanish jurispru- 
dence. The passages he cites are pertinent, and his 
theory is plausible ; yet in the relations with woman 
we suspect much must still be allowed for the long 
contact with the jealous Arabian. 

Calderon's characters and sentiments are formed 
for the most part on a purely ideal standard. The 
incidents of his plots are even more startling than 
those of Lope de Vega, more monstrous than the fic- 
tions of Dumas or Eugene Sue. But his thoughts are 
breathed forth in the intoxicating language of passion, 
with all the glowing imagery of the East, and in tones 
of the richest melody of which the Castilian tongue is 
capable. 

Mr. Ticknor has enlivened his analysis of Calde- 
ron's drama with several translations, as usual, from 
which we should be glad to extract, but must content 
ourselves with the concluding portion of his criti- 
cism, where he sums up the prominent qualities of the 
bard : 

"Calderon neither effected nor attempted any great 
changes in the forms of the drama. Two or three 
times, indeed, he prepared dramas that were either 
wholly sung, or partly sung and partly spoken ; but 



670 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

even these, in their structure, were no more operas 
than his other plays, and were only a courtly luxury, 
which it was attempted to introduce, in imitation of 
the genuine opera just brought into France by Louis 
the Fourteenth, with whose court that of Spain was 
now intimately connected. But this was all. Cal- 
deron has added to the stage no new form of dramatic 
composition. Nor has he much modified those forms 
which had been already arranged and settled by Lope 
de Vega. But he has shown more technical exactness 
in combining his incidents, and arranged every thing 
more skilfully for stage effect. He has given to the 
whole a new coloring, and, in some respects, a new 
physiognomy. His drama is more poetical in its tone 
and tendencies, and has less the air of truth and re- 
ality, than that of his great predecessor. In its more 
successful portions — which are rarely objectionable 
from their moral tone — it seems almost as if we were 
transported to another and more gorgeous world, where 
the scenery is lighted up with unknown and preter- 
natural splendor, and where the motives and passions 
of the personages that pass before us are so highly 
wrought that we must have our own feelings not a little 
stirred and excited before we can take an earnest in- 
terest in what we witness or sympathize in its results. 
But even in this he is successful. The buoyancy of life 
and spirit that he has infused into the gayer divisions 
of his drama, and the moving tenderness that per- 
vades its graver and more tragical portions, lift us un- 
consciously to the height where alone his brilliant ex- 
hibitions can prevail with our imaginations, — where 
alone we can be interested and deluded when we find 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 671 

ourselves in the midst not only of such a confusion of 
the different forms of the drama, but of such a con- 
fusion of the proper limits of dramatic and lyrical 
poetry. 

"To this elevated tone, and to the constant effort 
necessary in order to sustain it, we owe much of what 
distinguishes Calderon from his predecessors, and 
nearly all that is most individual and characteristic in 
his separate merits and defects. It makes him less 
easy, graceful, and natural than Lope. It imparts to 
his style a mannerism which, notwithstanding the mar- 
vellous richness and fluency of his versification, some- 
times wearies and sometimes offends us. It leads him 
to repeat from himself till many of his personages 
become standing characters, and his heroes and their 
servants, his ladies and their confidants, his old men 
and his buffoons, seem to be produced, like the masked 
figures of the ancient theatre, to represent, with the 
same attributes and in the same costume, the different 
intrigues of his various plots. It leads him, in short, 
to regard the whole of the Spanish drama as a form, 
within whose limits his imagination may be indulged 
without restraint, and in which Greeks and Romans, 
heathen divinities, and the supernatural fictions of 
Christian tradition, may be all brought out in Spanish 
fashions and with Spanish feelings, and led, through a 
succession of ingenious and interesting adventures, to 
the catastrophes their stories happen to require. 

" In carrying out this theory of the Spanish drama, 
Calderon, as we have seen, often succeeds, and often 
fails. But when he succeeds, his success is sometimes 
of no common character. He then sets before us only 



672 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

models of ideal beauty, perfection, and splendor, — a 
world, he would have it, into which nothing should 
enter but the highest elements of the national genius. 
There, the fervid yet grave enthusiasm of the old Cas- 
tilian heroism, the chivalrous adventures of modern, 
courtly honor, the generous self-devotion of individual 
loyalty, and that reserved but passionate love which, 
in a state of society where it was so rigorously with- 
drawn from notice, became a kind of unacknowledged 
religion of the heart, all seem to find their appropriate 
home. And when he has once brought us into this 
land of enchantment, whose glowing impossibilities his 
own genius has created, and has called around him 
forms of such grace and loveliness as those of Clara 
and Dona Angela, or heroic forms like those of Tuzani, 
Mariamne, and Don Ferdinand, then he has reached 
the highest point he ever attained, or ever proposed to 
himself; he has set before us the grand show of an 
idealized drama, resting on the purest and noblest 
elements of the Spanish national character, and one 
which, with all its unquestionable defects, is to be 
placed among the extraordinary phenomena of modern 
poetry." 

We shall not attempt to follow down the long file 
of dramatic writers who occupy the remainder of the 
period. Their name is legion ; and we are filled with 
admiration as we reflect on the intrepid diligence with 
which our author has waded through this amount of 
matter, and the fidelity with which he has rendered 
to the respective writers literary justice. We regret, 
however, that we have not space to select, as we had 
intended, some part of his lively account of the Span- 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 673 

ish players, and of the condition of the stage. It is 
collected from various obscure sources, and contains 
many curious particulars. They show that the Spanish 
theatre was conducted in a manner so dissimilar from 
what exists in other European nations as perfectly to 
vindicate its claims to originality. 

It must not be supposed that the drama, though the 
great national diversion, was allowed to go on in Spain, 
any more than in other countries, in an uninterrupted 
flow of prosperity. It met with considerable opposi- 
tion more than once in its career; and, on the repre- 
sentations of the clergy, at the close of Philip the 
Second's reign, performances were wholly interdicted, 
on the ground of their licentiousness. For two years 
the theatre was closed. But on the death of that 
gloomy monarch the drama, in obedience to the public 
voice, was renewed in greater splendor than before. 
It was urged by its friends that the theatre was required 
to pay a portion of its proceeds to certain charitable 
institutions, and this made all its performances in some 
sort an exercise of charity. Lope de Vega also showed 
his address by his Comedias de Santos, under which 
pious name the life of some saint or holy man was por- 
trayed, which, however edifying in its close, afforded, 
too often, as great a display of profligacy in its earlier 
portions as is to be found in any of the secular plays 
of the capa y espada. His experiment seems to have 
satisfied the consciences of the opponents of the drama, 
or at least to have silenced their opposition. It reminds 
us of the manner in which some among us, who seem 
to have regarded the theatre with the antipathy enter- 
tained by our Puritan fathers, have found their scru- 
2 d 57 



674 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

pies vanish at witnessing these exhibitions under the 
more reputable names of "Athenaeum," "Museum," 
or :t Lyceum." 

Our author has paid due attention to the other va- 
rieties of elegant literature which occupy this prolific 
period. We can barely enumerate the titles. Epic 
poetry has not secured to itself the same rank in Cas- 
tile as in many other countries. At the head stands 
the "Araucana" of Ercilla, which Voltaire appears to 
have preferred to "Paradise Lost"! Yet it is little 
more than a chronicle done in rhyme ; and, notwith- 
standing certain passages of energy and poetic elo- 
quence, it is of more value as the historical record of 
an eye-witness than as a work of literary art. 

In Pastoral poetry the Spaniards have better speci- 
mens. But they are specimens of an insipid kind of 
writing, notwithstanding it has found favor with the 
Italians, to whom it was introduced by a Spaniard, — 
a Spaniard in descent, — the celebrated author of the 
"Arcadia." 

In the higher walks of Lyrical composition they 
have been more distinguished. The poetry of Her- 
rera, in particular, seems to equal, in its dithyrambic 
flow, the best models of classic antiquity; while the 
muse of Luis de Leon is filled with the genuine in- 
spiration of Christianity. Mr. Ticknor has given a 
pleasing portrait of this gentle enthusiast, whose life 
was consecrated to Heaven, and who preserved a tran- 
quillity of temper unruffled by all the trials of an 
unmerited persecution. 

We cannot deny ourselves the pleasure of quoting a 
translation of one of his odes, as the last extract from 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 675 

our author. The subject is, the feelings of the dis- 
ciples on witnessing the ascension of their Master: 

" And dost thou, holy Shepherd, leave 
Thine unprotected flock alone, 
Here, in this darksome vale, to grieve, 
While thou ascend'st thy glorious throne? 

" Oh, where can they their hopes now turn, 
Who never lived but on thy love ? 
Where rest the hearts for thee that burn, 
When thou art lost in light above ? 

" How shall those eyes now find repose 
That turn, in vain, thy smile to see? 
What can they hear save mortal woes, 
Who lose thy voice's melody ? 

" And who shall lay his tranquil hand 
Upon the troubled ocean's might? 
Who hush the wind by his command? 

Who guide us through this starless night? 

" For Thou art gone ! — that cloud so bright, 
That bears thee from our love away, 
Springs upward through the dazzling light, 
And leaves us here to weep and pray!" 

A peculiar branch of Castilian literature is its Prov- 
erbs; those extracts of the popular wisdom, — "short 
sentences from long experience," as Cervantes pub- 
licly styles them. They have been gathered, more 
than once, in Spain, into printed collections. One of 
these, in the last century, contains no less than twenty- 
four thousand of these sayings ! And a large number 
was still left floating among the people. It is evidence 
of extraordinary sagacity in the nation that its hum- 
blest classes should have made such a contribution to 



676 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

its literature. They have an additional value with 
purists for their idiomatic richness of expression, — like 
the riboboli of the Florentine mob, which the Tuscan 
critics hold in veneration as the racy runnings from 
the dregs of the people. These popular maxims may 
be rather compared to the copper coin of the country, 
which has the widest circulation of any, and bears the 
true stamp of antiquity, — not adulterated, as is too 
often the case with the finer metals. 

The last department we shall notice is that of the 
Spanish Tales, — rich, various, and highly picturesque. 
One class — the picaresco tales — are those with which 
the world has become familiar in the specimen afforded 
by the "Gil Bias" of Le Sage, an imitation — a rare 
occurrence — surpassing the original. This amusing 
class of fictions has found peculiar favor with the Span- 
iards, from its lively sketches of character, and the 
contrast it delights to present of the pride and the 
poverty of the hidalgo. Yet this kind of satirical 
fiction was invented by a man of rank, and one of the 
proudest of his order. 

Our remarks have swelled to a much greater compass 
than we" had intended, owing to the importance of the 
work before us, and the abundance of the topics, little 
familiar to the English reader. We have no room, 
therefore, for farther discussion of this second period, 
so fruitful in great names, and pass over, though reluc- 
tantly, our author's criticism on the historical writings 
of the age, in which he has penetrated below the sur- 
face of their literary forms to the scientific principles 
on which they were constructed. 

Neither can we pause on the last of the three great 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 677 

periods into which our author has distributed the work, 
and which extends from the accession of the Bourbon 
dynasty in 1700 to some way into the present century. 
The omission is of the less consequence, from the 
lamentable decline of the literature, owing to the in- 
fluence of French models, as well as to the political 
decline of the nation under the last princes of the 
Austrian dynasty. The circumstances which opened 
the way both to this social and literary degeneracy are 
well portrayed by Mr. Ticknor, and his account will 
be read with profit by the student of history. 

We regret still more that we can but barely allude to 
the Appendix, which, in the eye of the Spanish critic, 
will form not the least important portion of the work. 
Besides several long poems, highly curious for their 
illustration of the ancient literature, now for the first 
time printed from the original manuscripts, we have, 
at the outset, a discussion of the origin and formation 
of the Castilian tongue, a truly valuable philological 
contribution. The subject has too little general attrac- 
tion to allow its appearance in the body of the text ; 
but those students who would obtain a thorough knowl- 
edge of the Castilian and the elements of which it is 
compounded will do well to begin the perusal of the 
work with this elaborate essay. 

Neither have we room to say any thing of our 
author's inquiry into the genuineness of two works 
which have much engaged the attention of Castilian 
scholars, and both of which he pronounces apocryphal. 
The manner in which the inquiry is conducted affords 
a fine specimen of literary criticism. In one of these 
discussions occurs a fact worthy of note. An ecclesi- 

57* 



678 BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

astic named Barrientos, of John the Second's court, 
has been accused of delivering to the flames, on the 
charge of necromancy, the library of a scholar then 
lately deceased, the famous Marquis of Villena. The 
good bishop, from his own time to the present, has 
suffered under this grievous imputation, which ranks 
him with Omar. Mr. Ticknor now cites a manuscript 
letter of the bishop himself, distinctly explaining that 
it was by the royal command that this literary auto da 
fe was celebrated. This incident is one proof among 
many of the rare character of our author's materials, 
and of the careful study which he has given to them. 

Spanish literature has been until now less thoroughly 
explored than the literature of almost any other Euro- 
pean nation. Everybody has read "Gil Bias," and, 
through this foreign source, has got a good idea of the 
social condition of Spain at the period to which it be- 
longs; and the social condition of that country is slower 
to change than that of any other country. Everybody 
has read "Don Quixote," and thus formed, or been 
able to form, some estimate of the high value of the 
Castilian literature. Yet the world, for the most part, 
seems to be content to take Montesquieu's witticism 
for truth, — that "the Spaniards have produced one 
good book, and the object of that was to laugh at all 
the rest." All, however, have not been so ignorant; 
and more than one cunning adventurer has found his 
way into the pleasant field of Castilian letters and car- 
ried off materials of no little value for the composition 
of his own works. Such was Le Sage, as shown in 
more than one of his productions ; such, too, were 
various of the dramatic writers of France and other 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 679 

countries, where the extent of the plunder can only be 
estimated by those who have themselves delved in the 
rich mines of Spanish lore. 

Mr. Ticknor has now, for the first time, fully sur- 
veyed the ground, systematically arranged its various 
productions, and explored their character and proper- 
ties. In the disposition of his immense mass of ma- 
terials he has maintained the most perfect order, so 
distributing them as to afford every facility for the 
comprehension of the student. 

We are everywhere made conscious of the abundance 
not merely of these materials — though one-third of the 
subjects brought under review, at least, are new to the 
public — but of the writer's intellectual resources. We 
feel that we are supplied from a reservoir that has 
been filled to overflowing from the very fountains of 
the Muses, which is, moreover, fed from other sources 
than those of the Castilian literature. By his critical 
acquaintance with the literatures of other nations, Mr. 
Ticknor has all the means at command for illustration 
and comparison. The extent of this various knowl- 
edge may be gathered from his notes, even more than 
from the text. A single glance at these will show on 
how broad a foundation the narrative rests. They 
contain stores of personal anecdote, criticism, and 
literary speculation that might almost furnish mate- 
rials for another work like the present. 

Mr. Ticknor's History is conducted in a truly philo- 
sophical spirit. Instead of presenting a barren record 
of books, — which, like the catalogue of a gallery of 
paintings, is of comparatively little use to those who 
have not previously studied them, — he illustrates the 



68o BIOGRAPHICAL AND 

works by the personal history of their authors, and 
this, again, by the history of the times in which they 
lived ; affording, by the reciprocal action of one on 
the other, a complete record of Spanish civilization, 
both social and intellectual. It would be difficult to 
find a work more thoroughly penetrated with the true 
Castilian spirit, or to which the general student, or 
the student of civil history, may refer with no less 
advantage than one who is simply interested in the 
progress of letters. A pertinent example of this is in 
the account of Columbus, which contains passages 
from the correspondence of that remarkable man, 
which, even after all that has been written on the 
subject, — and so well written, — throw important light 
on his character. 

The tone of criticism in these volumes is temperate 
and candid. We cannot but think Mr. Ticknor has 
profited largely by the former discussion of this sub- 
ject in his academic lectures. Not that the present 
book bears much resemblance to those lectures, — cer- 
tainly not more than must necessarily occur in the dis- 
cussion of the same subject by the same mind, after a 
long interval of time. But this interval has enabled 
him to review, and no doubt in some cases to reverse, 
his earlier judgments, and his present decisions come 
before us as the ripe results of a long and patient 
meditation. This gives them still higher authority. 

We cannot conclude without some notice of the 
style, so essential an element in a work of elegant 
literature. It is clear, classical, and correct, with a 
sustained moral dignity that not unfrequently rises to 
eloquence. But it is usually distinguished by a calm 



CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 68 1 

philosophical tenor that is well suited to the character 
of the subject. It is especially free from any tendency 
to mysticism, — from vagueness of expression, — a pretty 
sure indication of vague conceptions in the mind of the 
author, which he is apt to dignify with the name of 
philosophy. 

In our criticism on Mr. Ticknor's labors, we may be 
thought to have dwelt too exclusively on his merits. It 
may be that we owe something to the contagion of his 
own generous and genial tone of criticism on others. 
Or it may be that we feel more than common interest 
in a subject which is not altogether new to us; and it is 
only an acquaintance with the subject that can enable 
one to estimate the difficulties of its execution. Where 
we have had occasion to differ from our author, we 
have freely stated it. But such instances are few and 
of no great moment. We consider the work as one 
that does honor to English literature. It cannot fail 
to attract much attention from European critics who 
are at all instructed in the topics which it discusses. 
We predict with confidence that it will be speedily 
translated into Castilian and into German, and that it 
must become the standard work on Spanish literature, 
not only for those who speak our own tongue, but for 
the Spaniards themselves. 

We have still a word to add on the typographical 
execution of the book, not in reference to its mechan- 
ical beauty, which is equal to that of any other that 
has come from the Cambridge press, but in regard to 
its verbal accuracy. This is not an easy matter in a 
work like the present, involving such an amount of 
references in foreign languages, as well as the publica- 

2 D* 



682 CRITICAL MISCELLANIES. 

tion of poems of considerable length from manuscript, 
and that, too, in the Castilian. We doubt if any 
similar work of erudition has been executed by a for- 
eign press with greater accuracy. We do not doubt 
that it would not have been so well executed, in this 
respect, by any other press in this country. 



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